In the hush of the night

From the New York Times bestselling author and former James Bond novelist comes a gritty, riveting tale of modern crime, featuring a female FBI agent embroiled in a Russian human trafficking case. Chicago Special Agent Annie Marino examines the case of a dead young woman who possesses a tattoo Annie has come across before-that of bloody bear claws.

Several deceased women with the tattoo have turned up over the past few years, all suspected of being involved in a vast human trafficking operation. Annie's neighborhood friend, Jason Ward, is a young writer engaged to be married into an upper-class family from a posh Chicago suburb.

Jason believes his future brother-in-law, a war veteran, is definitely a bully-but does he also have ties to the Russian mob?Yana Kravec, a woman from St.

Petersburg, Russia, has been fraudulently lured into a trafficking scheme and thrown into a horrid and seemingly hopeless situation.

She is, however, determined to fight back and escape her captors. Annie's investigation eventually uncovers a sordid plot of procuring slaves overseas and marketing them in the US.

Her interests soon coincide with those of Jason and Yana, bringing the trio together to fight against a deadly network of criminals.

As the separate lives of these characters collide, their paths ultimately converge in a night of terror and survival in a Michigan forest, where they become the prey of evil men who will stop at nothing to protect their secrets.