"The toughest cases are the ones that hit closest to home"--Cover.

Contains an excerpt from Private Paris by the author.

When his cousin is accused of a heinous crime, Alex Cross returns to his North Carolina hometown for the first time in over three decades. As he tries to prove his cousin's innocence in a town where everyone seems to be on the take, Cross unearths a family secret that forces him to question everything he has ever known. Chasing a ghost he believed was long dead, Cross gets pulled into a case that has local cops scratching their heads and needing his help: a grisly string of socialite murders. Now he is hot on the trail of both a brutal killer, and the truth about his own past and the answers he finds might be fatal.