The Devouring Ledger

Ezra Coltrane has spent twenty years making other people's worst decisions add up to something tidy. From a cramped Wabash Avenue office that smells of dry-cleaning fluid and old coffee, he balances books no one else wants to read, for clients no one else wants to know , until Camden Rowe, a developer whose suburban empire Ezra once dressed in respectable figures, is found dead in a car that doesn't belong to him, with a ledger column that doesn't add up. Now the phone won't stop ringing. Lena Vasik, the ADA who walked out on Ezra three winters ago, is circling with a subpoena she hasn't earned yet. Oleg Duarte, the man who bailed Rowe out the first time, is circling with cash Ezra can't afford to refuse. Reggie Solano knows where Ezra hides his filing cabinets. Nora Whitfield knows what was buried inside them. And Marisol Coltrane, Ezra's sister, knows that her brother has been running from the same column of figures since before Camden Rowe had a name. Across twenty chapters of long November light and longer winters, Ezra must audit a chain of ledgers that leads through nursing homes, slot machine routes, locked suburban offices, and a set of books that never balances , no matter who dies trying to make it. The ledger is patient. The ledger is exact. The ledger remembers what its accountants would sooner forget, and in a city built on borrowed money, it is already tallying the names of those who will be devoured next.