Books

Lucia Serra came to Chicago to conserve a seventeenth-century painting for the Bellandi Foundation. She didn’t expect to find a flawless forgery, a hidden original, and her dead father’s mark buried in the frame.

Adrian Bellandi knows the moment Lucia sees too much, she becomes a target. To keep her alive, and to stop his father from burying the...

Consultant midwife Kerensa Vey has spent years becoming the clinician people trust when birth plans get complicated. She is warm, exact, and relentlessly careful never to make another person’s choice for them. Eli Verran, a consultant pelvic-health physiotherapist, has the opposite problem: when an answer takes time, he has learned to let other...

Katarina Vuković follows money until every hidden obligation has a name.

Her newest audit uncovers the Founding Settlement, a decades-old Bellandi-Vuković marriage bargain still buried beneath property, trusts, political appointments, and businesses across Chicago. The marriage authority is dead. The money it moved is not.

Lorenzo Bellandi has...

Attorney Nora Kearney has built her career around one rule: a capable adult gets to choose, even when the safer choice is ugly.

So when a protected client’s supposedly secure challenge is breached and Nora realizes the approved protection network may be compromised, she does the unforgivable thing. She takes the woman and disappears.

Gabriel Vale...

Dr Carys Venn trusts evidence, careful language, and the difference between what medicine knows and what it cannot promise. She has also spent most of her life refusing one role she never chose: being the person who is supposed to repair someone else’s loss.

Luke Trevaskis, Penhaven’s specialist midwife for fetal diagnosis and perinatal...

Dr Theo Bell is the colleague everyone can rely on. He takes the extra shift, fixes the broken plan, and never asks anyone to rearrange a life for him. Being easy to choose has always felt safer than asking to be chosen.

Consultant cardiologist Rhea Kelynack has built her life around a different rule: love must never become a contest. After...

Iain Rathbone has spent his whole life making sure nobody has a claim on him.

He founded Ardwyn Capital, a litigation-funding firm, on one rule: fund the fight, take the cut, and owe nothing to anyone, ever. He pays before the bill arrives. He refuses lifts, gifts and favours on principle. He keeps eleven years of paid receipts in a drawer he...

At fourteen, Ana Caterina Bellandi was entered into a future-marriage schedule. At twenty-two, she discovers the document that priced her is hiding something far more dangerous: a master index tied to eighteen people living under protected identities.

Luka Mihajlo Vuković is the man named beside her. Thirty-nine, ruthless, and head of the Vuković...

They know how to make other people feel safe. The trouble begins when they try to make love safe too.

Jonah Merrick has built his career on one promise: he comes back when he says he will. As Penhaven’s specialist perinatal mental-health midwife, his steadiness helps new mothers say the things they are most afraid to admit.

Nessa Rowe, the...

Maeve Kearney buried her husband eight weeks ago. She has no intention of handing his death over to the family that controls the routes, gates, and crews of Kearney Port.

As a maritime insurance investigator and an independent claimant, Maeve holds something Ronan Kearney cannot take from her: authority over Cian’s personal claim. Ronan, Cian’s...

Just before sunrise, a worker at the Ardent Ridge Data Campus finds Senior Building Inspector Martin Vega dead in a restricted technical area of the unfinished build. The site is full of real fall hazards, the schedule is already slipping, and the project wants its crews back to work. An accident would suit everyone.

Homicide Detective Lena Ortiz...

The apartment should have been empty. Its elderly resident died three weeks ago. So why is veteran home-care worker Birgit Holm dead inside it—and why do the records show seventeen more days of completed care?

Investigator Ida Munk knows the difference between care documented on a screen and care actually delivered in a person’s home. Before...

Callan Penrose has built his career on being the man Aldercombe can rely on when a match gets ugly. Taking the hit is part of the job. Admitting what those hits cost him is not.

Mara Vale has something to prove. Her independent player-welfare consultancy can make professional rugby better without making it softer, and Aldercombe is the contract...

The Morrowick Hounds need to repair the damage they caused. Tamsin Rowe refuses to let them do it by taking over her work.

Tamsin built Breakwater Ice Project to make hockey more accessible without handing control to the loudest institution in the room. The city-owned waterfront warehouse she is fighting to secure could become a permanent home...

Micah Teague has the kindest face on the whole route. That’s the point. Five times, the organization that owns him has sent him to close a house quietly and permanently, and five women let him through the door because he was the one man they trusted. He has never lied to any of them. He has never had to.

Greta Vail already knows what’s coming....

Wren Kovacs runs the house on Merrick Road the way she’s run it for seven years: three rules, one letter in the ledger, and never a name. It’s how a woman with nothing left to lose keeps a mafia safe house — and herself — alive.

Sabin Vukovic breaks the first rule before he’s through the door. He knows her name. He knows her rules well enough to...

Seven months separated. Seventeen minutes every morning. Neither of them has taken off the ring.
Kara Lindholm owns the night at Alder Reach Medical Center. She’s the hospitalist the nurses call when a patient looks wrong before the monitors agree, and she likes a shift with a hard ending. At 6:43 every morning, she hands her patients to the day...

The last time Dr. Leah Matsuda called a patient “safe to move,” she learned what one sentence can cost.

Eight years later, she’s the ICU attending the nurses at Alder Reach Medical Center call when the numbers look fine and something is still wrong. She traces every line herself. She checks unstable transfers personally, more often than anyone...