Publisher's Synopsis
Fresh from her career-changing case in The Glass Curtain, which won MARQUESA JESUS PIAZZA, known as Mach, the trust of Dr. MATTHEW ROWAN and Sergeant MIL URQUIA, Mach is now firmly embedded as a New York City crime reporter in the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner of the NYPD. Many of the characters from the first novel, including editor SCOTT SCREEN and Mach's beloved Jack Russell Terrier KITTY, appear in The Eye Inside. And some new characters are introduced, most notably an adversarial member of the police force, KLANDAGI MORRISON, a love interest/FBI cryptologist, DR. RODNEY HARGRAVE, and a smooth forensic accountant, THEO COSTAS. New York City and references to Sherlock Holmes season the novel's setting.In the last lines of The Glass Curtain, Mach and Mil are called to investigate a crime scene in which a young woman is found murdered on the campus of Columbia University during the winter break. The Eye Inside picks up quickly from this point, and the crime shares elements of two prior murders (unsolved) of women in Southern California. All clues point to a serial murderer, assigned the moniker The Third Eyelid Killer, due to a photograph he sends the police of the mysterious translucent third eyelid found in certain animals, including canines. GLORIA YAP, Kitty's dog walker, is called in to help decipher the canine clues throughout.Mach and Scott's paper is under siege by ERIC "TAI-PAN" RATHBOURNE, a Hong Kong media tycoon and corporate raider. This crisis creates tension in the office and requires Mach's energy to be divided between doing her job, navigating romantic waters, and helping Scott save the paper.A new layer of Mach is revealed. As she embraces the excitement of her reawakened career, she revisits the sacrifices she made to get there-namely romance, love, children, and friendship. She steps up her tendency to make poor choices in men-i.e. her boss, her source, and her colleague-underscoring that no matter how smart and savvy she is, she sabotages her own happiness because of her ingrained interpretation of her feminist upbringing.The pursuit of the killer uncovers an animal lab that experiments with canine DNA, and a money-laundering scheme that seems to be at the heart of the murders. With the help of the other characters, Mach and Mil uncover who the murderer is and why the young victim and others were targeted by the unexpected culprit. And Mach believes she has found love at last.
