All the Dead Were Strangers (Conrad Voort)

With his first two novels, Ethan Black revealed an ability to create unique characters inside stories that terrify, a rare combination in the world of contemporary thrillers. Now, as New York police detective Conrad Voort returns in his most compelling, complex, and seductive case yet, Black proves that he is, with such bestselling authors as Michael Connelly, John Sanford, and Robert Parker, one of the best we have writing crime fiction today.

Meeting for drinks in Greenwich Village after a ten year separation, Voort finds his boyhood friend Meechum frightened and depressed. Twenty-four hours later, Meechum has disappeared. The only clue in Voort’s possession is a cocktail napkin on which Meechum has written five names. Working his way through the list, Voort begins to connect a series of eerily “accidental” deaths around the country. All the dead were strangers. But two people on the list may still be alive–and in grave danger.

As Voort tries to locate them, he finds himself pitted against an enemy bigger than anything his sex crimes unit has ever encountered. Bigger than anything the New York police force has ever encountered. He has discovered a disturbing conspiracy of vast proportions. And now the conspirators have discovered Voort.

Suddenly Voort is locked in a shadow war against enemies who follow their own lethal agenda . . . an agenda so astonishing that it forces Voort, an honorable and moral man, to make a terrible choice: between going head-to-head with a champion of valor turned cold-blooded killer or an ordinary man about to commit an unspeakable crime.

Further complicating Voort’s life is the fact that he is falling in love with a beautiful doctor who just might be at the center of the conspiracy–and a key player in brutal acts of mass murder about to take place.

All the Dead Were Strangers is a powerful novel–intelligent, always surprising, and never less than thrilling.