GUILTY UNTIL PROVEN ALIVE
Nadia Rowan, twenty-nine, is one of the most respected digital-forensic analysts in Alder City. Her specialty is proving whether electronic evidence is authentic. She has built her career on the belief that data leaves traces and that the truth, however damaged, can be reconstructed. Then Judge Malcolm Avery is murdered. Within hours, the case against Nadia becomes almost impossibly complete. Security footage shows her entering Avery's home. Her fingerprints are recovered from the murder weapon. Her DNA is found at the scene. Her phone appears to travel with the killer. A transfer arrives in her bank account from a company connected to a case before Avery. Messages show her threatening him. Investigators recover a video confession in Nadia's own face and voice containing details the police have not released. Nadia insists every piece of evidence has been manufactured. That defense makes her look worse: if anyone could build fabricated digital evidence sophisticated enough to deceive experts, it would be her. Assistant District Attorney Ethan Cole prosecutes the case. He is not corrupt, foolish, or secretly sympathetic. He studies the evidence, believes it, defeats Nadia's defense, and helps send her to prison. Months after her conviction, another high-profile victim is murdered. Nadia's DNA, biometrics, device records, and face appear again. The new evidence says she committed this murder too. But the murder occurs while Ethan is personally standing across from Nadia inside a maximum-security prison. That impossible fact becomes the hinge of the entire novel. Ethan must decide whether to protect the conviction that made his career or reopen the case he once believed was airtight. Nadia must decide whether the man who destroyed her freedom can ever become useful, trustworthy, or eventually something more.
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