Mastermind

Dr. Theo Cray and FBI agent Jessica Blackwood confront a cataclysmic conspiracy in a pulse-quickening thriller by the Wall Street Journal bestselling author of The Naturalist.

A mysterious electrical storm plunges Manhattan into darkness. As a strange, smothering fog rolls in, all communication crashes. In the blink of an eye, the island seems to vanish into a void.

FBI special agent Jessica Blackwood and brilliant scientist Dr. Theo Cray know this isn’t a freak accident. It’s a sinister sleight of hand. Their greatest adversary, a serial killer and cultist known as the Warlock, has escaped during a prison transfer in New York. A depraved master of manipulation, he promised the end of days. He’s making good on it.

One by one, cities across the globe are erupting in chaos as they disappear into the same black holes. Even for two ingenious trackers like Jessica and Theo, there’s still so much to learn about the pattern to the Warlock’s madness. The voids are just a warm-up for something bigger. To discover it—to stop it—Jessica and Theo must descend into the darkest of shadows—and minds.

Andrew Mayne is the Wall Street Journal and Amazon Charts bestselling author of The Girl Beneath the Sea and Black Coral in his Underwater Investigation Unit series; The Naturalist, Looking Glass, Murder Theory, and Dark Pattern in his Naturalist series; Angel Killer, “Fire in the Sky,” Name of the Devil, and the Edgar Award–nominated Black Fall in his Jessica Blackwood series; and the Station Breaker novels. The star of Discovery Channel’s Shark Week special “Andrew Mayne: Ghost Diver” and A&E’s Don’t Trust Andrew Mayne, he is also a magician who started his first world tour as an illusionist when he was a teenager and went on to work behind the scenes for Penn & Teller, David Blaine, and David Copperfield. Ranked as the fifth-bestselling independent author of the year by Amazon UK, he currently works with OpenAI on applied artificial intelligence. For more on him and his work, visit www.andrewmayne.com.