Legally Dead

The first installment in the Michael Venuri series from Pulitzer Prize–winning author Edna Buchanan, following former federal agent Michael Venuri, who quits the Witness Protection Program to become a freelance identity-change expert.

Former United States Marshal Michael Venuri is still grieving the sudden loss of his wife and their unborn child when he learns of two missing children in rural Vermont. Flooded with guilt when he realizes it’s the same town where he previously relocated a protected hit man with perverse tendencies and a fondness for little girls, he escapes to Miami.

In Miami, he meets a NASA employee with a tainted reputation from being blamed for the death of two fellow astronauts. Venturi decides to help the man fake his death in order to give him a new life with a new identity. Pleased with the idea of using his Witness Protection Program skills to help someone get a fresh start, Venturi becomes a freelance identity-change expert, helping deserving individuals fake their deaths to start over. Each death is faked in a different unique, ingenious, and often spectacular manner. Venturi only requires that his clients not contact anyone from their previous life, including him. But it’s not long until something evil begins to stalk his clients.

Is it someone he refused to help? Are more innocents in danger because he tried to atone for a history that haunted him? Is he the target? Or is someone hunting one of the new people he relocated?