The Echo Thief

In Anchor City, the dead don't always stay that way. Memory is the new heroin. Yellow Chrome - first kisses, wedding days, the afternoon light on your best moment - sells to people chasing someone else's happiness. Black Chrome is darker. Street fentanyl. The junkies who chase it don't want to feel alive. They want those thirty seconds of absolute certainty that they aren't - the cardiac spike, the adrenaline flood, the specific euphoria of near-death without the inconvenience of going through with it. Most people who carry extracted memories burn out inside a year. The mind wasn't built for other people's endings. Sean Sinclair has been carrying them for fifteen years. Nobody knows why she can hold what others can't - hundreds of memories, grief and guilt and the worst seconds of dozens of lives, all of it stacked in a place she calls the Vault. Once she held an extraction too long and spent a week as a retired accountant from Queens named Harold Finkelstein who'd never forgiven his mother for dying. Filed taxes. Lectured her dead brother about butter for an hour. The Vault bleeds when it gets too full. Other people's lives start surfacing as her own. It should have broken her by now. It hasn't. But it's getting heavier. She also carries her brother. Billy died six years ago. In the forty seconds between his last heartbeat and the dark, Sean did something that shouldn't have been possible. Now he lives in the city's infrastructure - the signals, the cameras, the flicker of a streetlight that means I'm still here. Not a ghost. Not a recording. Her brother, still thinking, still watching, still giving her grief about the jacket he'll never stop wearing. Together they work the only trade she knows. When a job comes in to extract a wedding memory from a man named Chad Fitzgerald - forty thousand credits, clean pull, simple work - Sean takes it. It isn't simple. Inside Chad's memory she finds a word. Lighthouse. And something inside that memory finds her back. Something that's been watching long-term carriers across the city. Something that already knows her name. Now she's running from an intelligence that predicted her death before she knew she was a target, carrying evidence that could bring down the most powerful institution in Anchor City - and trying to keep her brother alive in a world that was never supposed to know he existed. The Echo Thief is a noir thriller about the weight we carry for the people we love, and how far we'll go to keep them. Featuring a cameo appearance by Salvatore "Sammy the Bull" Gravano - with his permission. BOOK ONE OF THE ANCHOR CITY TRILOGY

Pages: 353, Paperback, Independently published