Can you commit the perfect crime? Pilgrim is the code name for a man who does not exist. The adopted son of a wealthy American family once led a secret espionage unit of the U.S. intelligence agency. Before he vanished into anonymous retirement, he wrote the definitive book on forensic criminal investigations. But this book will haunt him. It will help NYPD Detective Ben Bradley track him down. And it will lead him to a rundown hotel room in New York, where the body of a woman is found face down in a vat of acid, her features erased, her teeth missing, her fingerprints gone. It is a textbook murder—and Pilgrim wrote the book. What begins as an unusual and challenging investigation turns into a terrifying race against time to save America from ruin. Pilgrim will have to embark on a journey from a public beheading in Mecca to abandoned ruins on the Turkish coast, through a Nazi death.