"Black Aries" is a gripping novel that tells the story of a marketing executive who returns to her hometown to stop an ambitious special investigator from exhuming her stepfather and exposing the secret she thought was buried forever.
In the spring of 1978, six-year-old Denise Blackburn caused her shell-shocked stepfather to fall to his death, then she killed the elderly neighbor who witnesses it. At least that is what the nightmares tell her.
Forty years later, thanks to negligent forensic practices by Lubbock County's long-standing medical examiner, a door to the past creaks open and special investigator Michael Thomas intends to walk through it. His official job: determine the accurate cause of death for countless victims of the former fraudulent ME's botched autopsies from 1978 until now. His own agenda: bring the person who murdered his grandmother in 1978 to justice and do it while keeping his personal connection to the case secret.
Denise is finally at a place in life that makes it worth living. She's the new Associate Creative Director at an up-and-coming ad agency in Manhattan, but an urgent call from her mother summons her back to Texas. On the flight home, Denise loses all her medication. She struggles to hide the side effects from her mother, but withdrawal from the drugs that she's depended on since childhood forces Denise's fragmented mind to unearth truths that tell a different story than what she remembers...one where maybe she's not a monster after all.
As Michael's investigation heats up and veers off in an unexpected direction, Denise must resort to murder to stop him. When the two collide, they unravel a lifetime of lies and unveil a serial killer hiding in plain sight.