DANTES’ INFERNO

At the stunning new Getty Museum, perched high above the city’s tony westside, a bomb hidden beneath a stairwell kills a teacher and a ten-year-old boy when it detonates during a school field trip. Quite by chance, the victim is the nephew of Edmond Sweetheart, the brilliant psycholinguistic profiler who has reined in more than one serial killer. With a personal vengeance, Sweetheart delivers the circumstantial evidence that points to John Dantes, an avowed anarchist with a history of targeting public works with his bombs.

A year later, with Dantes convicted of the crime, Sylvia Strange is summoned to Los Angeles by her colleague, Dr. Leo Carreras, to administer psychological tests on the incarcerated madman. Dantes, who maintains he is innocent of the Getty bombing, can hold his own against the rigors of Sylvia s psychological inquiry. As he plays his own mind games with her he knows things about her past that she d rather forget Dantes plants more than a seed of doubt in Sylvia s appraisal of his guilt. But if Dantes did not plant the deadly bomb at the Getty, who did?

The answer soon surfaces, as a copycat bomber lays claims to an alleged bomb at City Hall. Sylvia, anxious to return to the relative tranquility of Santa Fe, is nonetheless swept into the vortex of the investigation. Working alongside Sweetheart, as well as the FBI and LAPD, she reluctantly takes on the role as M s main contact. Guided by Dantes and his vision of L.A. s imminent destruction, Sylvia is thrust into more than one life-threatening scenario. As M leads her through a modern version of the nine rings of hell, she quite literally finds herself in the city s subterranean underbelly, working against the clock to discover M s identity before it is too late.