DIRTY RIVER

In a city where every coin remembers your name, someone has taught the money to forget.

A month after the verdict that should have made her, forensic authenticator Mara Vance is flagged, broke, and abandoned by the system she gave her life to keeping honest. All she has left is a locked drive and a single wire reference she cannot leave alone.

The trail runs from a dead banker through companies that rebuild broken places and keep no one on their books, washing not the money but the name attached to it, hop by hop, until the fortune arrives spotless in the great civic fund pouring the safe future onto every wall in the country. To follow it to the bottom, Mara needs the one friend who swore she was finished, and an account no lawful eye is permitted to open.

What waits at the end of the wire is not a criminal. It is quieter than that, and worse, and it carries a signature Mara is the only person left alive who can read. Pulling the thread will cost her a source who trusted her, a life she was offered, and the fragile safety of the daughter she keeps failing, and it will buy her nothing the world will ever agree to hear.

She can prove where the money went. She is about to learn what the truth is worth in a country that believes only the record.

DIRTY RIVER is the second novel in PROVENANCE, a surveillance-noir thriller series for readers of Blake Crouch, John le Carré, and the world of Minority Report.