The Face of the Assassin — David Lindsey

He reconstructs the faces of the dead. But nothing has prepared him for the true face of fear. Now one man must confront the frightening puzzle of his own personality while navigating a treacherous, hidden world where that which is alien becomes familiar, and the familiar is shrouded in mystery.

THE FACE OF THE ASSASSIN

The faceless are Paul Bern's business. As a forensic artist in Austin, Texas, Paul painstakingly reconstructs the likenesses of unfortunate souls whose features have been obliterated by crime or accident. As macabre as his vocation may be, it has become a comfortable and lucrative routine-until the day a mysterious woman arrives at his studio. The visitor brings two gifts. The first is a human skull she has smuggled out of Mexico. The second is a staggering secret that brings him eyeball to eyeball with a past he never knew he had.

Suddenly, Paul's own government blackmails him into cooperating in a clandestine mission against a Middle Eastern terrorist group that has made the drug jungles of South America its staging ground. By using his own face as bait to lure the enemy, he will become all too intimate with the underworld of violence that he seeks to destroy, while thousands of lives hang in the balance of his intricate and dangerous deception.

Paul's only guide will be a beautiful young girl with a strange and miraculous talent for seeing the unseeable. His chief nemesis will be an ingenious terrorist so brazen he refuses to mask his real identity from his pursuers. And his most stunning discovery will be the dark impulses that had always waited dormant in his own unwitting heart. Ultimately, the master of faces will never look at a face, his or others', the same way again-if he survives.