Cody Mcfadyen’s thriller series starring FBI Special Agent Smoky Barrett series is an enormous bestseller around the world. Now this electrifying writer and his vulnerable, fearless heroine have returned. Smoky heads a team of FBI agents who hunt down the most horrific of criminals. That’s only fitting, since early in her career, Smoky lost her husband and daughter to a violent madman who tied Smoky to a chair and sliced a curling scar across her face. Unbowed, Smoky continues to throw her heart into chasing twisted killers with her team of quirky, wise (and drily funny) agents. To work alongside this intensely talented FBI agent is an education in unravelling how evil slithers through the world. As THE TRUTH FACTORY opens, Smoky is pregnant and happily remarried. She and her team have just been summoned to a baffling scene in Denver: In a suburban cul de sac, two seemingly happy families have been slaughtered and carefully displayed. This leads Smoky into an enormous underground bunker and a plot that threads through the entire community. And then…well, this is a crime that will grip the world. Mcfadyen’s debut SHADOW MAN introduced Smoky. His reviews have been dazzling, and he has sold over 3.6 million copies around the world and has been published in twenty-five languages. He appeals to many of the same readers as Karin Slaughter and Thomas Harris, and he’s received high praise from Faye Kellerman, Lisa Gardener and John Douglas, author of MIND HUNTER. **

"He doesn't kill for thrills, for sex, or even for power.It's far more twisted than that.... " Cody McFadyen, acclaimed author of The Darker Side, The Face of Death," " and Shadow Man," "delivers this shocking new thriller that brings to light a psychopath unlike any we've ever seen--a killer who thrives in absolute darkness and doesn't derive pleasure from the kill. And only one woman has the ability to see him coming...even if it's already too late to stop her own murder. For FBI Special Agent Smoky Barrett, the wedding of one of their own was cause for celebration. Until a woman staggered down the aisle, incoherent, emaciated, head shaved, and wearing only a white nightgown. No one knows who she is or where she's come from--or why she's chosen to appear in a church filled with law enforcement agents. Then a fingerprint check determines that the woman has been missing for nearly eight years--that once she was someone's wife, someone's mother...and a cop. Imprisoning her in a dark cell, depriving her of any contact with the outside world, her enigmatic captor was a man she didn't know and who seldom spoke, who punished her only when she failed to follow his most basic instructions designed to keep her alive. Cold, businesslike, seemingly indifferent to his victims, he's a predator with an M.O. as terrifyingly inscrutable as any Smoky has ever encountered. As she fits together the pieces of what remains of his victim's fractured life, a chilling picture emerges of a killer every bit as calculating, masterful, and professional as Smoky and the team she leads--a professional psychopath who doesn't take murder personally and never makes a mistake. There's a reason he let one of his victims go free. And by the time Smoky pierces the darkness of his twisted mind, it may cost her more than she can bear to lose to escape. For a trap snapped closed the moment she took this case too much to heart.

Full of horrific violence, this solid third thriller to feature scarred FBI agent Smoky Barrett (after The Face of Death) shows that McFadyen knows how to shock. When the FBI director calls Smoky to Washington, D.C., to inspect the body of a beautiful young woman stabbed to death aboard an airplane, Smoky can't figure out why she's been assigned a case so far outside her L.A. jurisdiction. But when Smoky learns that not only was the victim, Lisa Reid, the child of a powerful Democratic senator but also that she was a pre-op transsexual, Smoky realizes that this is more than a bizarre homicide. Smoky and her team soon get on the trail of the man they dub the Preacher, a sin collector who murders people to obtain their darkest secrets. Harboring secrets of her own, Smoky must stay one step ahead of the killer if she's to bring him down. The forays into the victims' minds to expose their secrets are unnecessary, but the formidable Smoky makes up for the occasional plot tangent.

Once, Special Agent Smoky Barrett hunted serial killers for the FBI. She was one of the best–until a madman terrorized her family, killed her husband and daughter, and left her face scarred and her soul brutalized. Turning the tables on the killer, Smoky shot him dead–but her life was shattered forever.  Now Smoky dreams about picking up her weapon again. She dreams about placing the cold steel between her lips and pulling the trigger one last time. Because for a woman who’s lost everything, what is there left to lose? She’s about to find out. In all her years at the Bureau, Smoky has never encountered anyone like him–a new and fascinating kind of monster, a twisted genius who defies profilers’ attempts to understand him. And he’s issued Smoky a direct challenge, coaxing her back from the brink with the only thing that could convince her to live. The killer videotaped his latest crime–an act of horror that left a child motherless–then sent a message addressed to Agent Smoky Barrett. The message is enough to shock Smoky back to work, back to her FBI team. And that child awakens something in Smoky she thought was gone forever. Suddenly the stakes are raised. The game has changed. For as this deranged monster embarks on an unspeakable spree of perversion and murder, Smoky is coming alive again–and she’s about to face her greatest fears as a cop, a woman, a mother…and a merciless killer’s next victim.

Once, Special Agent Smoky Barrett hunted serial killers for the FBI. She was one of the best--until a madman terrorized her family, killed her husband and daughter, and left her face scarred and her soul brutalized. Turning the tables on the killer, Smoky shot him dead--but her life was shattered forever. Now Smoky dreams about picking up her weapon again. She dreams about placing the cold steel between her lips and pulling the trigger one last time. Because for a woman who's lost everything, what is there left to lose? She's about to find out.In all her years at the Bureau, Smoky has never encountered anyone like him--a new and fascinating kind of monster, a twisted genius who defies profilers' attempts to understand him. And he's issued Smoky a direct challenge, coaxing her back from the brink with the only thing that could convince her to live.The killer videotaped his latest crime--an act of horror that left a child motherless--then sent...