Fatal Wound

He’s a living doll. A dead one too.

Over the past year, true crime writer Sky Stryker has spent too much time inside the NYPD—sometimes as a consultant, sometimes as a suspect. She’s helped them crack impossible cases, including the murder of her own cousin. But now, they want her to walk away from an active investigation.

Even though a killer is still out there.
Even though another body is just a matter of time.

Desperate for a distraction, Sky takes on a missing persons case—a high school boy who vanished without a trace. In a city like Manhattan, the odds of finding him alive are slim. And then he turns up dead. Suffocated. Dressed in a sailor outfit, his face painted like a doll.

The discovery is unsettling, but to Sky’s friend and surrogate mother, it’s devastating.

Former FBI agent Callie Baros has seen this before, and it’s like reliving a bad dream she thought she’d woken from. She sent the killer, dubbed the Doll Collector, to jail years ago. Has he escaped? Is it a copycat crime?

Or has the real Doll Collector been at large the whole time?

As Sky, Callie, and the team dig into the secrets lurking inside the victim’s school, the truth emerges—twisted, terrifying, and far deadlier than they imagined. Because this time, the nightmare isn’t just repeating.

It’s evolving.

Fatal Wound is the eighth book in the Sky Stryker series by best-selling author Mary Stone. Some wounds never heal. Some killers never stop.