The INFLUENTIAL GAME: Secret They've Kept for a Hundred Years

A hundred-year-old secret. A society that will kill to keep it. One woman who won't stop asking questions.When Cambridge psychologist Dr. Eleanor Whitmore finds an unmarked parcel propped against her office door, she expects nothing more than an odd curiosity to pass the afternoon. What she finds instead is a private journal, over a century old, containing something far more dangerous than history: the working research of a man named Thomas Wren, who discovered exactly how fear spreads, how belief takes hold, and how an entire population can be moved without ever knowing it's been touched.Wren died in 1911, in circumstances no one ever properly explained.The knowledge he uncovered did not die with him.As Eleanor follows the trail the journal leaves behind, she's pulled into the Meridian Society, a secretive network of old, quietly powerful families who have spent a century deciding, on the public's behalf, exactly what the public may never be permitted to know. Some of them want the truth buried for good. Some believe it's long overdue for the world to see. And at least one of them is prepared to make sure Eleanor never lives to publish what she's found.The deeper she goes, the more she understands that Wren's death was never simply a historical mystery, it's a warning still playing out, generation after generation, inside an institution that has never fully reckoned with what it actually is.The Influential Game is a novel about the architecture of belief: who gets to shape it, who pays when it's abused, and what it costs an ordinary person to demand the truth from people who have spent a hundred years perfecting the art of never quite giving it.Perfect for readers of The Secret History, The Da Vinci Code, and any thriller that trusts its readers to follow a slow-burning conspiracy all the way to its reckoning.