NARCISSUS IN UTERO
A young woman stands barefoot in the winter snow of an Upper West Side New York City street, staring at an anonymous apartment building. She wears only a light coat, below which is a blood-stained light slip. She waits with a gun in the pocket of her coat, waiting for someone she does not know. Arrested, she has no identity beyond saying her name is Fea; she says nothing about why she might have been there, why she was waiting. The FBI’s CODIS lab in Quantico returns an exact DNA footprint identity: Belle Turner, seventeen, from Durango, Colorado.
Except that couldn’t be possible: Belle Turner had been murdered in front of her Colorado home months earlier.
And even more confusing: the girl Fea has an impossible third DNA footprint match—to former FBI agent Ryker Chase, the same former agent who once had lived in the building the girl Fea watched. Watched, and waited.
Two girls. One girl. And one former FBI agent who stares into darkness and dreams. Three people tied together by events of the past, and events of the future. Three who have flown with the starlings and walked in the shadows. Thus begins a search to find out what happened to two girls, or perhaps but one girl, on a journey of secrets and memories that takes us from New York City to the haunting vistas of Southern Colorado, from the wolf-inhabited landscape of Wyoming mountain solitude to the murderous desert wastelands of New Mexico and Arizona ....
NARCISSUS IN UTERO again brings to the page the story of mysterious one-time FBI Agent Ryker Chase. Trained in the "cut and sign" tracking ways of Homeland Security Native American 'Shadow Wolf' Agents, Chase has unwillingly grafted the ability to 'see' into shadows, forcing him to wrestle with 'The Other', who may or may not be his own existential self, or perhaps is in fact the One who is evil, toying with Chase, leading him. Haunting him.
The fear of oneself, the driving need to understand one's own identity, is at the heart of this new novel. ... NARICISSUS IN UTERO is the second book of the ‘The Shadow Wolf Chronicles’, following on from the earlier ‘A MURMURATION OF STARLINGS’, a post-modern mystery puzzle set largely in the harsh desert landscapes of the American West, a world of First Nations mysticism and violence.