The Angel of Caldera
(2026)(The eighth book in the Alex Harlan FBI Thrillers series)
A novel by Phillip Strang
She is the most beloved woman in Caldera. She is also its most prolific killer.
In a sun-bleached Arizona retirement town, the old are dying on schedule. Declared incompetent by emergency court order, stripped of their homes and savings, cut off from the families who love them — and then, when the estate runs dry, gone. Every death looks natural. Every file is clean. At the centre of it stands Patrice Linden, the "angel of Caldera," who sits up nights with the dying and never forgets a birthday.
FBI profiler Alex Harlan has spent his career hunting cruelty. He has never had to hunt kindness.
The town adores her. The courts protect her. The one son who tried to raise the alarm was written off as bitter and grieving. But as Alex pulls the thread, he finds something colder behind the warm smile — a faceless buyer he isn't permitted to touch, and a question he can't stop asking about his own father, failing in a care home two thousand miles away.
Be careful of the kind ones.
Next of Kin is the eighth Alex Harlan thriller and reads as a complete, standalone case.
Genre: Mystery
In a sun-bleached Arizona retirement town, the old are dying on schedule. Declared incompetent by emergency court order, stripped of their homes and savings, cut off from the families who love them — and then, when the estate runs dry, gone. Every death looks natural. Every file is clean. At the centre of it stands Patrice Linden, the "angel of Caldera," who sits up nights with the dying and never forgets a birthday.
FBI profiler Alex Harlan has spent his career hunting cruelty. He has never had to hunt kindness.
The town adores her. The courts protect her. The one son who tried to raise the alarm was written off as bitter and grieving. But as Alex pulls the thread, he finds something colder behind the warm smile — a faceless buyer he isn't permitted to touch, and a question he can't stop asking about his own father, failing in a care home two thousand miles away.
Be careful of the kind ones.
Next of Kin is the eighth Alex Harlan thriller and reads as a complete, standalone case.
Genre: Mystery