The Hollow Hours
A dead woman found in the harbor. A retired detective who can't let go. A judge whose name keeps surfacing in places it shouldn't. When a body pulls from the rain-swollen river near the old pawnshop district, Detective Sigrid Holm calls the only man who ever cared about the cold case file she's holding: her old mentor, retired detective Owen Pryce. The victim matches the profile of a girl Pryce interviewed years ago, a girl who walked out of a downtown bar and into silence. Now she's back, in pieces, with a thread leading straight to Judge Elara Vance's chambers. Pryce doesn't want the case. Vance made sure of that a long time ago. But the dead don't stay buried in this city, and neither do debts. With streetwise fixer Aldric Venn, journalist Delphine Solano, and a fragile witness named Tess Alder, Pryce begins pulling at a web that stretches from a waterfront bar to the marble halls of city hall. Lucien Croft, Vance's fixer, is watching. So is defense attorney Yorick Shaw, who knows more than he admits. And someone inside the investigation is feeding information to the wrong side. Every hour Pryce digs deeper becomes one of the hollow hours, the ones where men like him disappear and the city forgets they were ever there. If he stops now, the girl's death dies with her. If he keeps going, he may not live to testify about what he finds.