You Only Die Twice

Nobody knew the dead man. Not even his wives.

A body surfaces in the snow off a mountain pass in the Cascades that's about to close for the winter. One gunshot.

The ID in his pocket says Jason Carle, forty-nine, a devoted husband and stepfather from a lake town in Idaho where everybody liked him. But nobody can tell FBI Special Agent Avery Carver one true thing about him.

She pulls his records and gets almost nothing back. No employer. No relatives. A Social Security number that was never issued to anyone. And a titanium plate in his forearm, stamped with a serial number that was implanted in another man entirely.

A man who drowned off the Oregon coast.

He died twice. Seven years apart.

Now Avery has two grieving families who have never heard of each other, a widow in each of them, and a man who worked very hard to be dead once already. Somebody found out who he really was. Somebody made sure it took this time.

And every night, alone in a motel on the wrong side of the pass, Avery's phone lights up with messages from the husband she buried on her honeymoon.