The Mating Cry

On a December night three days before Christmas, a small-town California attorney takes a call that drags him into the affairs of the richest, strangest estate on the coast. His new client has just stepped off a train under a name that may not be his own, accused of a murder he cannot explain, watched by enemies who know far too much about him.

What the lawyer slowly learns is that a stone house brooding above the sea has stood for a thousand years and more — and that the men and women drawn to it do not age, do not die, and do not forgive interference. Some among them are weary of the long centuries. Others mean to use the secret for purposes that will reshape the world.

Caught between a beautiful woman with a wound that should have killed her, a soft-spoken stranger with an Aztec name, and a midnight tribunal older than the United States, an ordinary man must decide which side of immortality he wants to die on.