The Devil’s Breath

BEFORE THE SHADOWS. BEFORE THE MURDERS. FRANK PORTER WAS DROWNING IN A MISSING CHILD CASE IN A FARAWAY COUNTRY – WHERE OLD SCARS WERE FIRST OPENED.

Bodies are turning up in Oculto. No struggle. No motive. Witnesses say the killers moved like sleepwalkers.

On the surface, the deaths don’t connect-a shopkeeper, a student, an engineer. But each killer swears they don’t remember a thing. Each scene reeks of the same experimental drug whispered about on the streets: Devil’s Breath.

For the grieving Mattias Diaz, this is more than headlines. Years after a tragedy tore his family apart, his teenage son Carlos disappears –-and his name starts surfacing in the same breath as the murders.

Enter Frank Porter, a young Toronto detective on his first major assignment. He’s sent south to help find Carlos, expecting a missing-person case.

Instead, he lands in a country where ordinary people kill with empty eyes, a banned drug turns human beings into weapons, and a rising political movement marches under colours and symbols the world thought it buried decades ago.

Is Carlos a victim, a suspect…or something far more dangerous? Who’s really pulling the trigger when a mind can be switched off like a light? And what happens when the political party promising “order” is built on the ruins of a nightmare everyone else has chosen to forget?