A ritual murder on a mountain. A manuscript written in dead languages. An FBI analyst hunting a killer who has turned four hundred years of history into a blueprint for murder.

On a granite summit in Maine, FBI analyst Dutch Pascal kneels beside a body arranged with the precision of a forgotten liturgy.

The killer calls himself the Oracle.

His victims are not merely murdered. They are assigned roles. Each crime reveals another fragment of an ancient design, drawing Dutch and FBI analyst Sarah Sandhill through the buried history of New England—from a Jesuit mission destroyed in 1613 to forgotten cemeteries, old ship's logs, religious schisms, and a nineteenth-century vampire panic that should have nothing to do with the dead accumulating in the present.

But Dutch understands something the evidence cannot tell him.

The Oracle isn't simply killing people.

He's telling a story.

And Sarah discovers something just as disturbing: beneath the apparent chaos is a pattern—one that suggests the killer may already know how the investigation will respond.

To stop him, Dutch and Sarah must uncover what connects the victims, decipher the history the Oracle has deliberately resurrected, and determine where his centuries-old design ends.

Because the final chapter has already been chosen.

And someone is still missing.

The Oracle's Lantern is the first novel in the Dutch Required series—an atmospheric FBI historical thriller of ritual murder, ancient manuscripts, buried faith, and an investigation that becomes increasingly personal as two very different minds learn how much they need each other.