A taut, high-intelligence thriller with real emotional teeth…
A wounded ex-CIA operative learns that healing, like espionage, requires ruthless precision in Towles’s explosive finale in the E&A Investigations series. Still recovering from a hit-and-run and holed up in her family’s crumbling estate, Marissa Ellwyn is barely standing when a body vanishes from the morgue. The case pulls her and partner Derek into a global tangle of fraud, fringe tech, and the shadowy grip of Jacques Martel, the one enemy she and her father never outran. The past is circling. And Marissa’s almost out of moves.
Towles keeps the prose lean, the tension high, and the emotions raw. The father-daughter reunion crackles with unresolved grief and layered accusations. Instead of cheap sentimentality, Towles leans into the unease; Marissa’s disgust, yearning, and strategic detachment are rendered in pitch-perfect interior monologue. The hidden doors inside Marissa’s childhood home mirror the psychological traps she keeps springing on herself. Beneath the slick spycraft and shifting alliances is a deeper tale about the cost of compartmentalized lives and inherited legacies. Marissa may be broken, but she’s also brilliant and determined not to let anyone get away clean.
Towles delivers her best yet.
Pub date September 30, 2025
Indies United Publishing
Genre: International Thriller | Private Investigator
Series: E&A Investigations | Book Three
