Special Agent Maya Vance doesn’t hunt monsters. She hunts the ghosts they leave inside people.
They call her “The Archaeologist”—the FBI’s expert in psychological murder, in the crimes that leave no body but a changed personality. She knows how manipulators build fortresses in the human mind. She knows because she spent her childhood dismantling her mother’s.
Her new target is Julian Creed, charismatic founder of the Aletheia Project. A high-end mindfulness organization that may have programmed a Georgetown professor to shoot a stranger in a federal building. The evidence is circumstantial. The victims are true believers. The crime is invisible.
To stop him, Maya must become someone else. Mia Vogel—is burned-out, disillusioned, and perfect for recruitment. She will walk into Creed’s garden. She will let him try to prune her. She will use everything she knows about psychological architecture to bring him down.
But the garden has a way of taking root. The graft has a way of taking hold. And Maya is about to discover that the most dangerous story isn’t the one you’re told—it’s the one you start to believe.
For a woman who audits realities, the hardest truth to face may be her own.
