Publisher's Synopsis
When a prominent Mississippi civil rights attorney asks renowned neurosurgeon Bradford Stone to help her save the life of a white racist condemned to death for the cold case murder of a black man, he has no idea that he is about to be dragged through a deadly past he thought he had escaped once and for all. Stone, the disinherited scion of a powerful Delta Planter family, has no premonition that he is about live through the hellish proof of William Faulkner's axiom that, "The past isn't over; it's not even past." Set mostly in Mississippi - primarily the Delta region where the real-life gothic exceeds the most outlandish Flannery O'Connor story - Perfect Killer tells the story of a future which can never break free of the past. The mystery is centered in the Mississippi Delta in a top-secret military project begun decades ago in a facility once housing German POWs. The program, Project Enduring Valor, is designed to create the ultimate human killing machine. For over seventy years, has sought the Holy Grail of combat medicine: a chemical compound that would turn ordinary soldiers into weapons of mass destruction, the Perfect Killers. Now, after decades of covert trial and error which have resulted in troubling side effects such as the My Lai massacre, Enduring Valor is ready to be implemented on a massive scale--despite a few troubling side-effects. Before he knows it, Stone himself in the sights of the Project's director, a retired general and war hero turned presidential candidate. To get back his life, and expose the truth, Stone must struggle with the South's racist legacy, the demons of his past and penetrate the very heart of the lethal conspiracy.