Thirty years ago, in a quiet Cleveland house, an eight-year-old boy died. The death certificate said natural causes. It was signed, witnessed, filed, and believed. The man who signed it was a doctor named Thomas Harlan.
FBI profiler Alex Harlan reads the paper the dead leave behind: the signatures, the certificates, the small official lies that let killers walk free. Now a cold-case file has pulled him back to the one city he swore he'd never see again. Because the forgotten boy on page one was murdered, the proof was buried under his own father's name, and someone has been waiting three decades for a Harlan to come looking.
He is patient. He is polite. He has nothing left to lose and all the time in the world. And he knows Alex's name long before Alex knows his.
With the statute of limitations running out, a grieving sister who never once stopped telling the truth, and a faceless predator being dismantled a continent away, Alex has to prove what a single piece of paper spent thirty years denying: that a child had a name, that a lie has an author, and that the same hand which buries a body can be the one that digs it out.
Some signatures cost everything. This one will cost him his father.
Genre: Mystery
FBI profiler Alex Harlan reads the paper the dead leave behind: the signatures, the certificates, the small official lies that let killers walk free. Now a cold-case file has pulled him back to the one city he swore he'd never see again. Because the forgotten boy on page one was murdered, the proof was buried under his own father's name, and someone has been waiting three decades for a Harlan to come looking.
He is patient. He is polite. He has nothing left to lose and all the time in the world. And he knows Alex's name long before Alex knows his.
With the statute of limitations running out, a grieving sister who never once stopped telling the truth, and a faceless predator being dismantled a continent away, Alex has to prove what a single piece of paper spent thirty years denying: that a child had a name, that a lie has an author, and that the same hand which buries a body can be the one that digs it out.
Some signatures cost everything. This one will cost him his father.
Genre: Mystery