The Crooked Mile
Three years of quiet surveillance work has taught Cassian Aldridge one rule: see everything, commit nothing to memory, bill by the hour. So when a routine night parked outside the Continental Hotel turns violent, a body tumbling across the marble steps, a shooter vanishing into the rain, his photographs become the only evidence that exists. The victim was the Whitfield family's longtime accountant. The Whitfields, matriarch Margot, her brittle daughter Celeste, and the troubled son Devon, look like a portrait of old money and older secrets. But the deeper Cassian digs, the more the ledgers contradict themselves. Harold Vann, a retired auditor turned reluctant whistleblower, whispers about a crooked mile of hidden transactions. Maren Cho, a junior associate, slips him documents she was never supposed to have. Julian Pryce offers money for silence and a plane ticket out of town. Trent Wexler, the family lawyer, warns Cassian off in a tone that sounds like a threat. Someone wants the truth buried, and they're willing to add another body to the pile. As Cassian follows the paper trail from hotel suites to offshore accounts, from whispered warnings to a second killing on a fog-choked pier, he realizes the shooter may have been aiming at him all along. The only way out is to walk the crooked mile himself, one dangerous step closer to a reckoning that could collapse an empire, or bury him beside the man who died on the hotel steps.