The Pandora Protocol

How do you murder a man who sealed himself in alone, and never came out?

Federal judge Augustus Whitfield is found dead in his safe room - the door locked
from the inside, the cause ruled cardiac. His daughter insists it was murder.
The only person who'll listen is a prosecutor with secrets of her own.

Elena Vance reads people the way other people read books. In the half-second
between what a face shows and what the body reveals, she finds the truth. Now
she's been hired to find a killer who weaponized that same truth - a behavioral
modeling firm called Halcyon that turned smart homes into murder weapons, using
each victim's own trusted devices, apps, and secrets against them.

The safe room was the weapon. The protocol was the delivery system. And Elena's
own methodology - the method she wrote a book to teach - has been reverse-
engineered into a kill-machine by a woman who studied her, read her cases, and
has been designing every step of Elena's investigation from the start.

But Elena has a move her book never contained: the doubt. The half-second after
the half-second - the moment where the reader stops, and asks: who built this
gap for me to find?

Set in the grey winter of the Hudson Valley, with a cascading twist architecture
that keeps readers guessing until the final page, THE PANDORA PROTOCOL is a
literary detective thriller about the weaponization of trust - and the cost of
being the person who notices.

Elena Vance will return.