Benedict Hoffman and Helen Belle

An online manipulator with a deadly hold on his followers challenges an FBI agent to stop him in a gripping novel of psychological suspense by a Wall Street Journal bestselling author.

When a husband, wife, and son are murdered in their Denver home and the family’s teenage twins vanish, the case draws the attention of FBI profilers Helen Belle and Benedict Hoffman. It triggers more than professional alarm. It mirrors a horrific case they investigated five years ago, when a boy slaughtered his family and went mute after speaking only a handful of haunting words. Among them: Midnight Man.

Then, nearly thirteen hundred miles away, one of the twins is found dead in a snowy Ohio field, and the parallels between the past and present cases grow more disturbing. Identical suicide notes. The same symbolic blood imagery. And a shared obsession with an online fantasy game. Its mastermind is an influencer who manipulates his most vulnerable and alienated players into killing the people they love most.

The Midnight Man is back.

Helen and Benedict must hunt the darkest corners of the internet to find him before someone else falls prey to an insidious evil that, for now, is in total control of the game.

© 2026 by Barbara Nickless. ℗ 2026 Brilliance Publishing, Inc., all rights reserved.