A signature can bury a body.
Across the marble corridors of Washington sits the body built to protect the vulnerable — and it has quietly stopped protecting anyone. From one county to the next, sharp, competent, inconvenient people are being declared incompetent: stripped of their homes, their money, their vote, their names, by a single signature on a form they were told meant something else. Then, days before they can fight it in open court, they die. Quietly. Naturally. Certified clean.
FBI profiler Alex Harlan has spent his career taking captured offices apart one county at a time. Now he finally sees the shape of it: the offices were never the crime. They're the harvest. Above them sits a watchdog that rotted on its own, a charming grandee who wrote the very standards he profits from breaking — and, higher still, a forgettable man with a bad tie who treats two hundred ruined lives as a portfolio, and never once has to stand in the room where the harm comes down.
To prove it, Alex has to keep one sharp old woman alive long enough to swear she was never confused — only contained. To win it, he has to climb a staircase of signatures into the dark, toward a buyer who has spent thirty years being impossible to find.
But a second patient man has been waiting at the top of a different staircase. One who knew Alex long before the Bureau. One who slips into a guarded room, harms no one, and leaves only a gift — and a single, gentle word: come home.
Some debts a courtroom can collect. This one, only Alex can pay.
Power of Attorney is the eleventh Alex Harlan thriller. For readers of slow-burn crime fiction where the monster wears a good suit, and the system is the murder weapon.
Genre: Mystery
Across the marble corridors of Washington sits the body built to protect the vulnerable — and it has quietly stopped protecting anyone. From one county to the next, sharp, competent, inconvenient people are being declared incompetent: stripped of their homes, their money, their vote, their names, by a single signature on a form they were told meant something else. Then, days before they can fight it in open court, they die. Quietly. Naturally. Certified clean.
FBI profiler Alex Harlan has spent his career taking captured offices apart one county at a time. Now he finally sees the shape of it: the offices were never the crime. They're the harvest. Above them sits a watchdog that rotted on its own, a charming grandee who wrote the very standards he profits from breaking — and, higher still, a forgettable man with a bad tie who treats two hundred ruined lives as a portfolio, and never once has to stand in the room where the harm comes down.
To prove it, Alex has to keep one sharp old woman alive long enough to swear she was never confused — only contained. To win it, he has to climb a staircase of signatures into the dark, toward a buyer who has spent thirty years being impossible to find.
But a second patient man has been waiting at the top of a different staircase. One who knew Alex long before the Bureau. One who slips into a guarded room, harms no one, and leaves only a gift — and a single, gentle word: come home.
Some debts a courtroom can collect. This one, only Alex can pay.
Power of Attorney is the eleventh Alex Harlan thriller. For readers of slow-burn crime fiction where the monster wears a good suit, and the system is the murder weapon.
Genre: Mystery