A Decade of Beads

A logistics chain is co-opted for crime. Bainbridge, Illinois is its hub. It's about to come crumbling down.Lizzy Waldron built her career out of manifests and margins; Forest Frost's was built on lies and regret.When a body washes up with a Midwest Logistics badge, the quiet work of moving parcels unravels into a machine built to move more than appliances. Detective Emerit Baker follows the crumbs: a rubberized lot, line¿hauls rerouted to empty parking lots, a barge with hidden compartments, and a savant who can visualize the entire operation's flow.What begins as an investigation becomes a reckoning. The people who held this network together-drivers, managers, and those who did the dirty work-may be clever, but they are not invisible. To stop the chain, Emerit must use the very humanity Lizzy avoids: leverage, compromise, and an appeal for redemption that could free them-or ruin them. Who pays the tab when survival is a business model?A noir¿tinged unraveling of a trafficking network that hides inside ordinary commerce. A moral thriller that asks whether survival justifies the compromises that people make-and who gets left paying the price.