The Long Debt
(2026)(The second book in the Ray Kessler FBI Thrillers series)
A novel by Phillip Strang
A retired FBI translator opens her own front door and is beaten to death in her hall.
Nothing was taken. Nobody heard a thing. Special Agent Ray Kessler goes as a courtesy, because the dead woman used to be one of theirs, and finds a photograph moved four inches on a shelf in a house where nothing else was touched.
She knew who was at the door. She let them in anyway.
Within three weeks, a records clerk in Cleveland is dead in his own hallway, an analyst in Virginia is dead in her garage, and Kessler has no case number, no authority, and no crime he can name. Because there is no crime.
Thirty-eight people inside the federal system have spent twenty years passing on small, true, worthless facts — a filing date, a schedule, which ambulance is going where — to people who never asked them to. None of them was paid. None of them stole anything. And every one of them was bought a long time ago with a kindness they could never repay.
Somebody is collecting what they know. Somebody is selling it. And when someone looks at a name, that name stops being a name.
Kessler is suspended, hunted, and running out of people he is willing to spend. To prove what nobody can be charged with, he will have to put one more name into the water.
A standalone FBI thriller. If you like Mick Herron, Robert Crais, or the cold procedural end of John le Carré, start here.
Genre: Thriller
Nothing was taken. Nobody heard a thing. Special Agent Ray Kessler goes as a courtesy, because the dead woman used to be one of theirs, and finds a photograph moved four inches on a shelf in a house where nothing else was touched.
She knew who was at the door. She let them in anyway.
Within three weeks, a records clerk in Cleveland is dead in his own hallway, an analyst in Virginia is dead in her garage, and Kessler has no case number, no authority, and no crime he can name. Because there is no crime.
Thirty-eight people inside the federal system have spent twenty years passing on small, true, worthless facts — a filing date, a schedule, which ambulance is going where — to people who never asked them to. None of them was paid. None of them stole anything. And every one of them was bought a long time ago with a kindness they could never repay.
Somebody is collecting what they know. Somebody is selling it. And when someone looks at a name, that name stops being a name.
Kessler is suspended, hunted, and running out of people he is willing to spend. To prove what nobody can be charged with, he will have to put one more name into the water.
A standalone FBI thriller. If you like Mick Herron, Robert Crais, or the cold procedural end of John le Carré, start here.
Genre: Thriller
Used availability for Phillip Strang's The Long Debt