Tideline

Lena Fairchild has built her life on the back of other people's paperwork. From a cramped office above Wabash, she chases delinquent accounts, reconciles books for clients who won't meet her eyes, and prays every month that the rent clears. When a nervous man in a damp overcoat walks in for an 8:45 appointment and never walks out, Lena's careful anonymity ends at the edge of a chalk outline. The dead man is Salvatore Vitelli, a name attached to ledgers that reach into the Castellano family's legitimate businesses, the Halsey Foundation's charitable accounts, and a police pension fund nobody wants audited. Detective Lt. Vincent Cassano writes her off as a witness; the Castellanos write her off as a loose thread. With her office sealed and her client list in someone else's hands, Lena has one advantage: she knows where the money went. Reeling in Reuben Holt, a disgraced investigator with his own reasons to hate the same names, she starts pulling threads that will unravel a decade of quiet deals, while a killer decides whether her bookkeeping makes her a threat or an asset. Every figure she balances brings her closer to the truth. Every truth she finds narrows her odds of surviving until the next fiscal year.