The Ninth Name

A killer is sending his victims the one memory they never shared. The last will unmake the world.

At Aldmoor College, a small school nestled on a hill in northern Minnesota, a night librarian is found on the eighty-eighth step of the bell tower. She's sitting upright as if waiting, clutching a photograph of herself as a child at a lake her own sister swears she never saw.

State agent Tess Marchetti is sent to close the case quietly. Then a second body turns up in the arboretum, holding another impossible photograph, and every victim's last envelope traces back to the campus mail carrier's route. Tess needs someone who can read the strange marks carved beside the dead, and the only one who can is Rev. Dr. Anders Lindqvist, the dry, disarming director of the Center for Theological Inquiry. He's also the one man she's certain she can't have.

At the heart of the Center crouches a statue everyone calls a gargoyle. It isn't one. And each time someone dies, the people who loved them begin to forget.

The Ninth Name is a haunting speculative thriller about grief, faith, and the price of being remembered.