The Blood Compass Cases

She built her career catching killers. This case will cost her everything she believes about herself.

Detective Constance Egan is the sharpest investigator in the St. Louis Metropolitan Police Department’s Homicide unit — a woman whose uncanny ability to read crime scenes and decode human behavior has made her both indispensable and unsettling to...

Four people are dead. The coroner signed every one of them natural. Detective Constance Egan knows better, because she was raised by the most patient killer St. Louis ever missed.

Three weeks after she put her own father in a cell, Constance is handed a case no one else will touch. Participants in a clinical drug trial at a St. Louis research...

St. Louis is frozen solid, and so is the ice on Detective Constance Egan’s crime scenes — no blood, no struggle, no explanation. Just a body laid out with its palms turned up, and cuts across the chest arranged in careful, deliberate rows.

Everyone else sees a wound pattern. Constance sees margins. Sees spacing. Sees writing.

What she can’t yet...