The Glass Saint
Mara Castelli has seventy-two hours before the locks on her door change and her life as she knows it ends. Broke, behind on rent, and nursing a glass of bourbon for breakfast, the down-on-her-luck private investigator is one foreclosure notice away from becoming a cautionary tale. Then Father Declan Mahoney collapses on the steps of St. Brendan's Church with a shard of shattered stained glass pressed against his chest, and everything changes. The diocese calls it a heart attack. Mara knows better. Drawn into the priest's final, fractured mystery by a debt of gratitude she swore never to repay, she begins to dig, and quickly realizes the saint's broken image is more than a relic. It's a map to something the Church has buried for decades, something worth killing to protect. From the marble halls of the archbishop's residence to the shadowed offices of the powerful Thorne family, Mara's investigation pulls her deeper into a web of corruption, secret ledgers, and a relic so valuable that Cardinal Vincent DeSalle himself has ordered her stopped. Her only allies are a sharp-tongued journalist named Inés Romero and a forensic pathologist with secrets of his own, but every thread she pulls tightens the noose around her own throat. As the foreclosure deadline looms and the bodies begin to fall, Mara faces an impossible choice: save herself and walk away, or chase the saint's fractured light all the way into the dark, and risk losing everything, including her soul.