The Violet Dragon

Evan Stone was executed sixteen days ago. So when New Orleans homicide detective Jack Carter walks into a murder scene bearing Stone’s private signatures—details that were never released to the public—there are only two possibilities. Someone is copying a dead serial killer. Or Evan Stone isn’t dead. He isn’t. Hidden from the world inside a classified research facility, Evan has become Patient Zero in EE-132: an experimental program designed to do what prison, therapy, and the threat of death never could—force a psychopath to feel empathy. Dr. Alice Walker believes violence can be treated at its source. Using escalating psychedelic states and immersive psychological conditioning, she intends to make Evan experience the suffering he inflicted from the inside. At first, the experiment appears to work. Then Evan begins seeing things Alice didn’t put there. Geometries that recur where they shouldn’t. Information he could not possibly know. A presence at the edge of perception that becomes clearer every time they open his mind. While Jack hunts a killer who seems connected to a man officially buried, Alice keeps pushing Evan deeper—until the question is no longer whether the experiment can make a monster feel. It’s whether something else has begun feeling him back. The Violet Dragon is a psychological crime thriller that begins in the streets of New Orleans and descends into psychedelic horror, government secrecy, fractured identity, and the possibility that consciousness is much larger—and far less private—than we think.