Legally Dead : A Novel

Fresh from her triumphant Love Kills, Pulitzer Prize–winning author Edna Buchanan launches a new series featuring former federal agent Michael Venuri, who quits the Witness Protection Program to become a freelance identity-change expert.

Michael Venuri is a former U.S. Marshal and special operative in the Marines whose wife and unborn child die in a fluke accident on the Staten Island Ferry. After learning of two missing children in rural Vermont, the same town where he previously relocated a protected hit man with perverse tendencies and a fondness for little girls, he escapes his guilt by fleeing to Miami. When he meets a NASA employee with a reputation tainted from being blamed for the death of two fellow astronauts, Venturi helps 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 in order 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 soon something evil begins to stalk his clients.