What are you working on?

This is something people have been asking me quite a bit lately. And I don't really have a great answer. Try to sum up a five hundred page book in a few lines, off the top of your head. Then try it with one that you're still in the middle of writing.

But since it is almost done, and I'm reasonably certain of the basics of the story, I've scribbled up a preliminary "cover blurb" to answer the questions. Something like this would end up on the back flap of the book when it's published, subject to revision by several other people, of course.

Here it is, for the first time anywhere:

The Prometheus Gate

November 1966

Al Grimsby walks into the Third District Police Station in Cleveland, Ohio—carrying the body of a boy he has just killed. He turns himself in, and confesses to twenty-five more child murders.

February 2007

After serving more than 40 years of a life sentence, Al Grimsby escapes from a maximum security prison. And the killing begins again.

Christina Falcone, the FBI’s top behavioral analyst, is assigned to profile and apprehend him. Skeptical from the start, her investigation leads her into a maze of conflicting clues—secret government experiments, legends of lost gods and an archaeologist named Carter McAlester, who works for a shadowy organization with their own agenda—a desperate search for a legendary Sumerian tablet, an artifact that may predate civilization itself, and which may hold the key to an unspeakable power.

A power that Al Grimsby may already possess, and which may have driven him mad.

While Carter pursues the artifact from the streets of Berlin to the dusty ruins of Babylon, watched by his own mysterious masters, Falcone finds that she is the one being hunted. Plagued by nightmares and dark visions, she races to discover the truth before she too descends into madness, and before Grimsby can finish the bloody work he began four decades before.

Before the Prometheus Gate can be opened.