What fires the blood, freezes the heart, twists the mind and drives a person to kill?G. M. Ford, author of the critically acclaimed Leo Waterman mystery novels, returns with a stunning tale of serial lies, corruption, and murder -- and throws an unforgettable new pair of investigators into the mad cosmopolitan mix of present-day Seattle.Frank Corso is a difficult man. A defrocked journalist vilified for allegedly making up "facts" on a major crime story while working for the sacrosanct New York Times, he now lives in virtual seclusion on a boat moored on the opposite end of the country -- surviving on the substantial royalties from a bestselling book and on his pay for the occasional column in a local tabloid, the Seattle Sun. Yet it's Corso whom the slow and sheltered Leanne Samples asks for when she walks into the Sun offices and announces that her courtroom testimony, which put Walter Leroy Himes on Death Row, was a lie.Several years earlier, eight Seattle women were slain over the course of eighty days, their bodies carefully displayed in Dumpsters throughout the city by a maniac whom the press dubbed "the Trashman." Leanne Samples would have been victim number nine, she claimed at the time, had she not barely escaped from the clutches of Walter Himes, a large, unwashed, prime sociopathic example of wasted humanity Now Himes is only six days away from execution and everyone wants him dead: the victims' families, the police, the