He spent his whole life betting that people forget. He never met the one woman who can't.

District Attorney Adrian Mercer is found dead in his locked study-gun in his hand, a confession glowing on the screen-the night before he's set to unseal the biggest corruption indictment in the city's history.

The city wants a tragedy. The brass wants it closed by morning. Everyone needs the honest man to have simply broken under the weight of what he knew.

Detective Cassandra Vale knows it's murder before the coroner does-because she stood in that study two years ago, and her flawless memory shows her the one thing that's wrong.

Cass remembers everything. It's a gift that has always felt like a sentence. But as she and her partner, Ethan Ward, pull the thread, the staged suicide unravels into something far worse: a decade-old killing on the waterfront, an innocent man buried alive in a prison cell, and a machine of money and power that has spent years clearing inconvenient people off the most valuable land in the city-protected, every step, by cops.

When the people erasing the truth realize the only witness they can't shred, seal, or buy is the inside of Cass's head, they don't come for the evidence. They come for her memory. And for the one person she can be reached through.

The Honest Man is the explosive fourth Vale & Ward File-a twisty, fair-play thriller of murder, city-hall corruption, and a detective whose perfect memory is the last honest record left in a city built to forget.

New readers can start here-no need to have read Books 1-3.