Ellison Cooper’s Sayer Altair series calls on her own experience with neuroscience, as a murder investigator, and as a certified K9 Searach and Rescue Federal Disaster worker to inform the series with a high degree of authenticity.

She returns with the third in the series, Cut to the Bone, an original story with the kind of didn’t-see-it-coming twists that will startle readers.

Sayer is still grieving for her dead fiance’and building her reputation with her work into the minds of serial killers for the FBI, as she builds her little untraditional family in Washington DC and its environs.

When she’s called to the scene of young girl’s body, left inside a circle of baboons by the Einstein Memorial outside the National Academy of Sciences.

It isn’t long before Sayer and her team, with several returning and interesting characters, learn that just hours before, the victim was one student on a bus filled with twenty-four high school STEM students.

Within the first hour that bus left DC, the bus, driver, chaperone and all of the students have completely disappeared. And then a grisly discovery leads to an all-out manhunt for the sick person who had engineered this tragedy.

But hope survives for some of the students, and Sayer finds herself thwarted at every turn as she tries to find the psychotic person with a fixation on Egyptology who is behind this.

But when she finds out who it is and how that has happened, her world will be turned upside down once again.

Cooper has created realistic characters who gain our attention and empathy. The setting brings DC and its neighborhoods to life. All of this is wrapped within a chilling tale of false leads, laced with real science, to create a story with fast pacing and a race against time.