Having been an elite CIA operative for twenty-five years, the last twenty spent in the Middle East, Michael Lott has left the Company and is teaching in a small New England college where he has written a novel that tells the story of a group of wealthy businessmen who are coerced by a Senior White House official into funding a terrorist attack that would allow the United States to declare war on a Middle Eastern country. Lott submits his manuscript to an old college friend who owns a publishing house. It is August of 2001. Three weeks later 9/11 happens. Philip Drake of Drake Publishing stands at his office window holding the manuscript in his hands as he watches the towers crumble and he wonders how his friend could have foreseen such an event. In his quest to find out how Lott could have known such a thing, Drake unwittingly puts into motion a series of events that will eventually cause a powerful man in the government to find out about the manuscript. He, also, wants to know how Lott came to write the manuscript. Soon, as the body count begins to grow, Lott finds himself and those closest to him, in mortal danger.

In the late 16th century, King James the VI, the son of Mary, Queen of Scots, captures an entire family who have been terrorizing the Scottish countryside with acts against God and man. The family pays the ultimate price for their crimes. So says the legend. But what if King James had not captured all family members? What if two had been missed? Survived? A brother and sister who then began to renew the family and keep the bloodline intact. And what if, forty years later, the descendants of the slain patriarch come to the new world, bringing with them the old ways of the family. The stealing. The killing. The unspeakable. For one hundred years they terrorize the settlements of the colonies, slowly moving ever north and leaving behind death, until finally settling in a picturesque valley in New Hampshire in 1722.
Two hundred and fifty years later, Barbara Taylor and her family re-locate to the quiet, rural community of Girvan, leaving the hectic pace of the city far behind. Sitting on a chaise lounge on the back deck of her new home, with her three children in school and her husband at work, Barbara looks out to the thick forest behind her house and says a silent prayer, because everything has worked out so well for her family. The towns people are friendly, her husbands new job is perfect for him, the kids are active in school, and her neighbor, Paula, is becoming a close friend. Things could not be better.
True, several pregnant women have gone missing in recent years, and one woman was mauled by a bear deep in the woods, but that was before she moved to Girvan. And some of the old-timers might be bit strange. But every town has their eccentrics and tragedies. Girvan was no different. It takes a few years before Barbara Taylor realizes that Girvan, however, is different. But by then, Barbara finds herself drawn into a horror which there may be no escaping from.

The first body was found along the River Walk. A second body was found at the museum. Both bodies had been posed a certain way that led Detective Erik Miller to believe that the killer was making some kind of a statement, though he didn’t know what that statement might be. When a small package arrives at the Manchester Police Department addressed to Detective Miller, it contains a poem that promises another victim will soon be left somewhere in the city, and a note that taunts the detective. Miller now has a serial killer on his hands. The bodies are being posed and the poems and taunting notes are clues to why the killer is killing women. Miller just has to understand what it all means. Detective Kristen Day is assigned to the case to help Miller. As the body count increases, they come to understand just what it is The Universal Killer is doing, and that a woman, Megan the Roach, may be the key to stopping the madness. And why, in the taunting notes from the killer, is Detective Miller being accused of being the reason for the rampage?
THE UNIVERSAL KILLER is not a study in police procedure. It is more of a psychological journey into the mind of madness and what might cause a mind to go there. Occasionally, we get a first person glimpse into that tortured mind. And when we do, it is frightening to realize how narrow the border is between normalcy and insanity. How easy it is to step over that border. That, with enough adversity, real or perceived, any one of us could be forced over that line.