Vortex — Ray Garton

Karen Moffett and Gavin Keoph have investigated vampires in Los Angeles in Night Life and werewolves on the northern California coast in Bestial, but this time they face something utterly baffling… and deadly.

Blockbuster horror novelist Martin Burgess has money to burn and enjoys spending it to find out if the paranormal things he writes about are real. He hires Moffett and Keoph again and sends them to California's Mt. Shasta. Long believed by spiritual seekers and New Agers to be a “vortex” of magnetic and spiritual energies, Mt. Shasta is a mystical locale, allegedly the site of alien visitations, paranormal apparitions, bizarre physical phenomena, and even Lemurians, an ancient race of little people from Atlantis believed to be living inside the mountain.

Strange things are happening in the small town at the foot of the mountain, things that have remained invisible to most, but not all, of the residents -- things that have caught the attention of Martin Burgess and his small army of computer geeks and conspiracy theorists.

Skeptical of the New Age mumbo-jumbo, Moffett and Keoph encounter an extraordinary, hungry creature that is being used to malevolent ends by a powerful and cruel enemy. Uncovering the mysterious secret in Mt. Shasta is one thing -- staying alive long enough to share it with anyone is another.