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Dark Empath: A Thriller
HE USED TO HEAL BROKEN PEOPLE. NOW HE HUNTS THEM.
When former therapist Shane Doyle flies from Louisiana to Southeast Asia for a last-minute business meeting, everything goes wrong—fast. What should have been a routine trip spirals into a nightmare that leaves him trapped in a brutal detention system with no way out. To survive, Shane is forced to shut off the very instincts that once defined him.
Five years later, he’s released without explanation. The man who walks out isn’t the man who went in.
Shane is done trusting people. His search for answers pulls him through the darker corners of Southeast Asia, where secrets thrive, loyalties shift, and psychology becomes a weapon. The people who destroyed his life created something colder and far more dangerous than the man they tried to break.
Dark Empath is a globe-spanning thriller about betrayal, survival, and the cost of becoming the thing you once feared.
Johnny Mack is author of the acclaimed thriller The Pinned Butterfly, about which Tod Goldberg, New York Times bestselling author of Only Way Out, writes, “The Pinned Butterfly is noir of a higher order. Taut, fast-moving, emotional, and filled with surprises. Johnny Mack is a modern-day Robert Stone and this novel is an essential piece of crime fiction.”
When former therapist Shane Doyle flies from Louisiana to Southeast Asia for a last-minute business meeting, everything goes wrong—fast. What should have been a routine trip spirals into a nightmare that leaves him trapped in a brutal detention system with no way out. To survive, Shane is forced to shut off the very instincts that once defined him.
Five years later, he’s released without explanation. The man who walks out isn’t the man who went in.
Shane is done trusting people. His search for answers pulls him through the darker corners of Southeast Asia, where secrets thrive, loyalties shift, and psychology becomes a weapon. The people who destroyed his life created something colder and far more dangerous than the man they tried to break.
Dark Empath is a globe-spanning thriller about betrayal, survival, and the cost of becoming the thing you once feared.
Johnny Mack is author of the acclaimed thriller The Pinned Butterfly, about which Tod Goldberg, New York Times bestselling author of Only Way Out, writes, “The Pinned Butterfly is noir of a higher order. Taut, fast-moving, emotional, and filled with surprises. Johnny Mack is a modern-day Robert Stone and this novel is an essential piece of crime fiction.”
339 pages, Kindle Edition
Published April 1, 2026
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April 18, 2026
Wow! I love the tension, intricate plot, and most of all the complex protagonist Shane whose grief leads him down dark alleys. Shane loves old movies, and the novel is an homage to those movies, both in being cinematic and its ability to portray complex characters in vivid settings. Bravo!
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