Someone is killing entire families, forcing fathers to hang their wives and children before taking their own lives. How does the killer do it? And what is the meaning of the small iron horse the killer leaves at every murder scene? FBI agent Melissa Saxon and her handpicked team are racing against time to solve the mystery before more families die. Former anti-terrorist operative Colonel Mark Bishop and the survivors of his command think they know. One of their own, a stone killer who calls himself the Hangman, has come out to play, and he's trying to draw out not only Bishop, but his former comrades—the elite team known as Iron Horse. Only the Horsemen can stop one of their own. But the team is disbanded, the survivors scattered. Bishop himself is tormented by guilt for the things he had to do to keep one of his men from suffering an agonizing death. Their adversary is not only a skilled assassin, but a master at creating fear. Behind the scenes, shadowy and powerful figures pursue their own plans for Bishop and the Hangman. Mark Bishop, Melissa Saxon, and the last of the Iron Horsemen will have to use all their courage and every resource, including an array of high-tech weapons, to stop the Hangman. What they have to do will put everything they ever believed in to the ultimate test and push Bishop to the edge of sanity.
Author
J.D. Rhoades is America's foremost writer of the genre known as "Redneck noir," and his biography reads like "Tobacco Road" as written by Hunter S. Thompson. Rhoades never knew his parents; he was found abandoned on the steps of a cut-rate Filipino tax preparation service in Slidell, La. As a child, he was bounced around between a series of orphanages, reformatories and opium dens. His first brush with the law came when he shot a man in Reno just to watch him die. He was seven years old at the time. Rhoades first turned to drugs at the age of five, when he discovered you could get high by snorting Nestle’s Quik through a rolled up copy of Highlights magazine. Since then, he claims to have ingested marijuana, peyote, heroin, psilocybin, uppers, downers, screamers, laughers, dried banana peels, glue, paste, mucilage, LSD, DMT, STP, ABC, CNN, TLC, Sterno, Drano, Bondo, Ketamine, Dopamine, glucosamine, Ovaltine, and Krispy Kreme. He hit rock bottom when he did all of them in the same night and woke up two weeks later, hanging upside down by his knees from a tree limb in Duluth, Minn., and singing an aria from “Die Fledermaus.” In German, a language that he does not speak. Rhoades is rumored to have once killed a stripper with a fondue fork and disposed of the body using an electric pencil sharpener over a period of 14 hours. Ii is not known whether the rumors are true that Rhoades kidnapped the Lindbergh Baby, nor can reports that he was the shooter on the grassy knoll when Kennedy was shot be confirmed. He does, however, know Tom DeLay personally. -Biography contributed by James Frey
