Black Ice Reckoning
A 4:17 a.m. call pulls insurance investigator Tessa Marlowe from her Burlington apartment to the frozen wreckage of Route 9, where a totaled sedan and a jackknifed tractor-trailer have left one man dead beneath a yellow plastic sheet. The wreck looks like black ice. The paperwork says otherwise. Tessa's cold case instincts ignite when she discovers discrepancies between the damage patterns and the policyholder claims filed by local adjuster Dale Fenwick , discrepancies that point to a coordinated ring of staged crashes laundering money through rural Vermont and into the portfolios of executives like Phillip Goss and corporate power broker Victor Halsey. Paired with skeptical veteran Calvin Briggs and shadowed by enigmatic fixer Garrett Halsey, Tessa follows a trail of falsified police reports, reluctant witnesses, and bodies that keep accumulating. Lena Rourke, grieving and terrified, holds the key to the whole scheme , but speaking up means putting her brother Eli directly in the crosshairs of men who have already killed to keep their profits frozen in place. As Tessa closes in on the conspiracy's architect, she is offered a promotion, a payoff, and a warning to walk away. The choice she makes in the next forty-eight hours will either shatter a multimillion-dollar fraud empire or bury her beneath the same ice that claimed the first victim.