The Fifth Witness

Some secrets survive the people who keep them. When investigative journalist Jack Mercer opens his dead father's study, he finds twenty years of carefully preserved evidence pointing to a single night - October 17, 2001 - and a question his father never dared ask aloud: what happened to the five children in the building? One of them was Victoria Hale. She doesn't remember the night. She doesn't remember the boy who held her hand and told her not to go toward the red door. She doesn't remember making the only free choice anyone made in that building. She's about to. The Fifth Witness is a literary conspiracy thriller about memory, inheritance, and the cost of truth. It follows Jack and Victoria as they unravel a decades-long cover-up by Atlas - a private intelligence organization that has been managing what people know, what they remember, and what they're allowed to understand about themselves. At the center of everything is Aaron Cross. A boy who disappeared twenty-three years ago. A boy who left behind a lighthouse cache, a seven-name witness list, and a tape recorded for whoever remembered. Someone remembered. For readers of John le Carré, Kate Atkinson, and Tana French. A novel about what we owe the truth once we find it - and what the truth costs the people who carry it. The Jack Mercer Files is a seven-book series. Book Two, The Missing Name, is forthcoming.

Pages: 471, Paperback, Independently published