The Cardinal Cipher
When private investigator Cassius Wren takes the Hart case, he expects another routine missing persons job. Celeste Hart, a reclusive archivist working inside a centuries-old cathedral, has vanished without a trace, leaving behind only a locked drawer and a single sheet of paper covered in symbols no one can decode. Her sister Sydney refuses to believe the police's conclusion that Celeste walked away willingly, and she's willing to pay whatever it takes to find the truth. But the deeper Wren digs, the more the case resists him. The cipher leads him to Father Anselm, a disgraced priest with secrets of his own, and to a string of disappearances stretching back decades, each victim connected to a hidden archive someone has spent centuries protecting. When journalist Mara Quill starts asking the same questions and ends up in a hospital bed, Wren realizes the cardinals at the heart of the mystery aren't birds at all. They're witnesses. Or targets. With his own stack of unopened bills mounting and a city that doesn't care whether one more person disappears, Wren has to decide how far he'll go to break a code someone is willing to kill to protect. Every cipher has a key. Finding it may cost him everything, including the woman he's beginning to suspect is more than just a client.