The Mind Architect

Dr. Atticus Vaughn can tell you how many times you will blink before you lie. He can read a stranger's pulse in the hollow of a throat from across a crowded room, and name the exact second a smile stops being real. In Cambridge they called it a gift. In Philadelphia, eleven weeks into a borrowed job with the police department, his new captain calls it a nuisance. Then a man dies in a locked room with the marks of his own fingernails in the wall, and the file says heart condition. Four months earlier, the city's Chief Medical Examiner went off a bridge. He left behind a folder, a pen with red ink, and one sentence that no one in the building will say aloud. Now a second death, a third, a fourth, each a different room and each a different victim. Every one of them is a person with a clean record, a good name and a perfectly natural cause of death. Only Atticus can smell the faint, sweet bitterness hanging in the air of every scene. And only Atticus notices that whoever is building these rooms knows exactly what each victim fears most. He is a profiler, not a hero. He counts, he watches, he clicks his pen two fast and one slow when he is afraid. The killer, it turns out, is counting too. THE MIND ARCHITECT is an interactive story. You are Atticus Vaughn. At seven moments the case will turn on a single choice, and each choice leads somewhere different. Some paths end in a courtroom, some in a cemetery, and one, if you are patient and kind and lucky, in the only ending where nobody has to die for the truth to come out. There are eight endings. Every body tells. Every killer has one.