Mystery/Thriller

They called Marcus Vance a traitor when the combat hospital in the North District was bombed, leaving him to rot in Oakhaven’s high-security pen for six years. Only one man stood up for him in public: Dr. Julian Sterling, the city’s beloved philanthropist hero. When Marcus is quietly released, Sterling hires him for a secretive off-the-books medical extraction in the docklands. Midway through the operation, Marcus realizes the armed hit squad surrounding the warehouse isn't there to protect him, they were sent by Sterling to finish the job started six years ago. But six years in Blackwood Pen taught Marcus things medical school never could. He isn't the idealistic medic who went in; he's a precision killing machine who knows every nerve, artery, and weakness in the human body. Armed with a strange, high-contrast visual perception developed from prison combat experiments, his Golden Finger, Marcus survives the setup and begins a silent, ruthless campaign to tear down Sterling’s heroic empire from the shadows.

They taught him how to read people. No one taught him how to read himself. Evren is twenty-eight, French, and very good at his job. As an investment strategist and art collector in Paris, he moves through a world of private galleries, old family names, and gatherings where the real business is never the business on the agenda. He wins by patience and observation, not money. He notices what people do with their hands. He reads provenance the way other men read contracts. Then an incident pulls him beneath the surface of that world. Behind the prestigious companies and carefully kept reputations sits a network of concealed histories, protected agreements, and secrets several generations old. Evren's ability to anticipate what people will do next earns him allies, enemies, and the attention of investigators who want to know where a man his age gets his influence. It also earns him Theron, a British lawyer with the same gifts and none of the same restraint, and Anouk, a journalist who trusts nothing she has not verified herself. Evren has spent his life staying three steps ahead of everyone in the room. What he has never done is ask who arranged the room. A conspiracy crime thriller set in modern Europe, where reputation is currency, secrets are assets, and the most dangerous opponent is the one who sees the pattern first.

The war ended twenty years ago. The treasure was never found. Mbappe has one last mission in him. His son is sick, the medicine costs more than he will ever earn, and the Empire that gave him medals and scars has nothing left to offer but indifference. When Theron arrives with a map and a rumor, a chance to claim the Eagle's Hoard, the fortune that was promised to them and stolen by the generals who never set foot in the jungle, Mbappe resists. He knows what greed does to men. He knows what he is capable of when the killing starts. But he agrees, on one condition: no killing, no innocents, take what they are owed and vanish. He cannot keep that promise. The heist succeeds. The vault beneath Kaethar holds more gold than they dreamed, and for a few hours, in the torchlight, they are rich beyond imagining. Then Oberon, heir to the Warlord-King, lets them carry the treasure out of the jungle because he wants them exhausted and off guard and far from help when he comes to take it back. General Kael, commander of the imperial garrison, wants the gold for himself and will kill anyone who stands between him and the fortune that was supposed to fund the occupation. And the team begins to fracture, because the weight of the gold is heavier than any of them anticipated, because Jude disappears with a chest and a map, because Chico dies in the first ambush, because betrayal is easier than loyalty when the stakes are this high. The pursuit across the Reach is a nightmare of violence and moral decay. They abandon the gold to save a life and kill to get it back. They become the thing they swore they would never become.