Nine Minutes Before

Emily Larson has driven the road her husband died on every January for eight years. Jacob lost control at mile marker nine on Route 191, in the snow, racing to be there when his son was born. The state troopers ruled it weather and closed the file. The only detail that never sat right with Emily was the fourteen-second call from a prepaid number that hit Jacob's phone nine minutes before the switchback. She asked twice. They shrugged. She stopped asking. She did not stop wondering who calls a man on a burner phone nine minutes before he dies.

Then a black SUV hits a moose on that same road in that same snow, and the man who climbs out of the wreck is standing too still for the situation. Nathan knows the mile markers. He knows her name before she gives it. Within a mile of the ride she offers him, he has read her the way she reads a design brief, and behind the iron gate of the compound he built in the Gallatin foothills, her license plate is already running. He is worth four billion dollars, and the men who watch him now know her son draws a superhero named Captain Courage in the back seat of her Subaru.

What Nathan has spent eighteen years carrying, and what Emily is about to be pulled into, is a reckoning with the man who murdered his father and made it look clean. The network that killed Charles Caldwell is still running, still cataloging anyone who comes within three miles of the gate, and Emily and Owen are inside its frame now. Emily's eye was trained to find the thing a client doesn't know they're telling her. It turns out the same eye can read a money trail.

A taut, slow-burning romantic suspense about a widow, a dangerous man, an eight-year-old with a sketchbook, and the thread that finally pulls.