Part of Series
A lavish penthouse party on top of a Vegas hotel and casino plays host to a bizarre set-up to murder in which a security guard is trapped and killed in a private elevator—and the body soon vanishes . . . leading crime scene investigators Nick Stokes and Greg Sanders straight to an uncanny circus troupe with deadly connections to none other than the Russian mafia. In the meantime, Ray Langston and Catherine Willows are called to a psychiatric facility where two patients have just escaped after attacking an orderly. One of the escaped patients, an Iraq war veteran, managed to smuggle in a military-grade nerve gas, inducing realistic and shared three-dimensional illusions and hallucinations . . . and Ray and Catherine must race against time in order to find two very dangerous individuals now roaming freely on the streets of Las Vegas...
Author
Pseudonyms: Don DeBrandt & DD Barant Donn Cortez is a pseudonym for Canadian author Don DeBrandt. Born in Saskatchewan, he currently lives in Vancouver, British Columbia. In addition to North America, his books have been published in Germany, France, Italy, and Russia. His influences include Spider Robinson and John D. MacDonald, among others. He took a darker turn for The Closer, a hard-edged story about a serial killer hunting other serial killers. His follow-up, The Man Burns Tonight (set at Burning Man) was more of a classic mystery. This was followed in rapid succession by five CSI: Miami tie-in novels and two CSI: Vegas novels.He has also contributed numerous pop-culture essays to BenBella’s SmartPop anthologies, on subjects such as Angel, Firefly, The Golden Compass, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, King Kong, the X-Men, Star Wars, and Star Trek. He was the guest editor (as well as a contributor) to the essay anthology Investigating CSI.
