By: Steven Long Mitchell & Craig W Van Sickle

But while Jarod is capable of becoming anyone he wants to be, the heart-rending truth is – he doesn’t know who he himself is. Stolen as a child and raised and exploited for his genius by The Centre, the now free Jarod vows to discover the truth about who he is, where he came from and the location of his real family.

But much like the challenges Jason Bourne faces, seeking answers about his identity and taking care of the wrongs he’s trying to right, Jarod’s path in the outside world is fraught with roadblock after roadblock. The dangerous worlds he infiltrates as a Pretender are rife with intense scrutiny, constantly threatening his complex ruses to exposure.

Then there are those who simply want Jarod dead.

All the while he must stay a step ahead of his relentless pursuers from The Centre, who want him recaptured at any cost – alive – preferably.

Leading The Centre hunt for Jarod is the sexiest woman on the planet, the complex, bitch-on-wheels, Miss Parker, a tenacious woman Jarod has known since childhood. Theirs is a truly multifaceted cat and mouse relationship – one driven by Jarod who holds the key to many of the emotional secrets at her very core, secrets that fuel her relentless drive to recapture him.

Since her mother’s suicide at age 12, Miss Parker has long sought the acceptance and respect of her iron-fisted father, the man who runs The Centre and who is a master manipulator of his daughter’s increasingly vulnerable feelings surrounding her quest for his love. In Miss Parker’s mind, excising the demons of her past and present and the key to Daddy Parker’s love boil down to one thing: recapturing Jarod. And while hell hath no fury like Miss Parker, deep down inside her reside complex issues with her buried feelings for Jarod – the boy she shared her very first kiss with.

For Jarod, Miss Parker is a constant tightrope he walks – at once trying to open her eyes to family and Centre lies, while also dealing with those same feelings for her – feelings with deep roots in his own boyhood.

One thing is certain – theirs is a pursuer/pursued relationship like no other before it – one that goes far beyond say, Inspector Gerard and his Fugitive. The Jarod/Miss Parker chase is a scintillating one, teeming with lies, secrets and answers – all bound together by emotional ties and mutual scars.

Alongside Miss P on The Centre side of The Pretender – Rebirth is Sydney, Jarod’s surrogate father figure and Centre psychologist who raised Jarod and nurtured his genius for The Centre’s disreputable purposes. To Jarod, Syd is both friend and foe, confidante and captor, counselor and betrayer. But Syd’s calm paternal connection to Jarod remains strong, often in conflict with The Centre’s mandate to bring Jarod back in at any cost.

For Jarod, he senses Sydney holds the emotional keys to his core – the truth about his past and the identity of his natural birth parents he was stolen from and whom he longs to reunite with.

While Sydney accepts and struggles with the guilt over his part in Jarod’s tumultuous Centre life, he also claims not to have known the deadly consequences behind Jarod’s Centre work or to know the answers to Jarod’s origins.

During Jarod’s upbringing at The Centre from age 4, Sydney oversaw all of Jarod’s care and work. The work known as simulations. Much like a computer would be used to crunch data to arrive at answers, in simulations, Jarod would immerse himself into a given real life scenario and emotionally connect to the human variables in that situation to arrive at answers to explain a tragic event or a solution to prevent it.

In The Pretender – Rebirth Jarod discovers that survival in the outside world will require all of his extraordinary skills and brilliance. It will require tenacity and guile, risk and fearlessness, keen human instinct and yes, even a little help from his new friends. Rebirth is at once an enthralling tale of one man’s exploration of life around him, intricate suspenseful mystery and intense edge-of-your-seat thrill ride – a fast-paced novel that captures and reignites the cult hit TV series for both the loyal generation of Pretender fans who’ve long awaited Jarod’s return and for a new generation of readers about to discover what many before them already have…

There are Pretenders among us…