What Justice Costs
(2026)(The fifth book in the Mara Fenn Investigations series)
A novel by Patricia Neary
In Westmoreland County, justice isn't blind — it's just very good at looking the other way.
A phone call at dawn pulls investigative journalist Mara Fenn back to Greensburg — an associate who let something slip about her friend Anna's case has gone quiet, and the settlement that owes Anna a new life has stalled without explanation. Mara tells herself it's nothing. She's wrong before she even sits down to dinner.
At Fulton Street, a friend's coworker is quietly drowning in a custody battle she can't win — a judge who sets a trial date and then refuses to hold it, forcing both sides to sign an agreement instead, enforced with threats and humiliation in open court. What looks like one exhausted woman's bad luck is, Mara starts to realize, a pattern with a name nobody in town will say out loud.
The deeper she goes, the closer it circles back to a courthouse she thought she understood — and to a cardiac finding, made to look ordinary, that ended her own mother's life on paper long before anyone admitted what really happened.
Some costs are paid in money. Others never stop coming due.
Genre: Mystery
A phone call at dawn pulls investigative journalist Mara Fenn back to Greensburg — an associate who let something slip about her friend Anna's case has gone quiet, and the settlement that owes Anna a new life has stalled without explanation. Mara tells herself it's nothing. She's wrong before she even sits down to dinner.
At Fulton Street, a friend's coworker is quietly drowning in a custody battle she can't win — a judge who sets a trial date and then refuses to hold it, forcing both sides to sign an agreement instead, enforced with threats and humiliation in open court. What looks like one exhausted woman's bad luck is, Mara starts to realize, a pattern with a name nobody in town will say out loud.
The deeper she goes, the closer it circles back to a courthouse she thought she understood — and to a cardiac finding, made to look ordinary, that ended her own mother's life on paper long before anyone admitted what really happened.
Some costs are paid in money. Others never stop coming due.
Genre: Mystery