Karma — Mitchell Smith

IN A WORLD RULED BY FATE, there are moments that are beyond any one person's control. For Evan Scott, that moment comes high atop a half-finished skyscraper under a starlit Manhattan night, when he witnesses a woman plunging thirty stories to her death. Their eyes meet briefly and suddenly Evan's comfortable world has been irretrievably shattered.

AND HIS IS A COMFORTABLE WORLD. A successful architect with New York savvy, a handsome husband and father who enjoys the country-club lifestyle afforded by his Greenwich, Connecticut, address, Evan is the American Dream with a picture-postcard setting. Yet even he has his demons. His nights are haunted by Vietnam nightmares. His days are spent in the arms of his plain and passionate mistress, who offers a love his stunning wife, Catherine, cannot or will not give. Yet he cannot forget the woman who died, and in whose eyes he glimpsed utter fear.

OFFICIALLY HER DEATH IS RULED AN ACCIDENT, but Evan has questions. Questions about the silence of the woman's father, the construction foreman on the site. Questions about Rao Electrical, a company with a multimillion-dollar wiring contract for the building. Questions about the NYPD detective, who tells Evan to forget his questions. Questions that begin to yield horrifying answers with the hideous slaying of someone close to Evan - a death too personal to leave unavenged.

DETERMINED TO UNCOVER THE TRUTH about the woman's death - at a price he feels has already been paid - Evan realizes he's become a one-man army, battling the police, his friends and family, and an enemy unseen by everyone but him. As the stakes rise, the carnage climbs, and Evan must track down and somehow destroy a powerful crime family that even the Mafia fears, a crime family that is the master of every means of murder.