At 2:00 a.m. Everlee Payne wakes to a message from her best friend—an impossible, wrong message—and within hours the friend is found dead, staged and brutal. A three-year-lost phone shows up at the crime scene with Everlee’s photo on it. Miles, Everlee’s gentle boyfriend, becomes a suspect when the forensics find his DNA under the victim’s nails. The detective on the case is Canon Greene—Everlee’s ruthless, charismatic ex. As evidence spirals and old betrayals surface, Everlee’s past in a disastrous university episode and the vanished phone point to a setup. But who would want to frame her? Why would her best friend be the target? As Everlee digs, she unearths everyone’s secrets: a lover’s jealousy, a fixer in the city’s underworld, a man willing to die for money—and a plan she once hatched in private that may have gone far beyond what she intended. This is a razor-sharp revenge mystery about how trust fractures, how the worst kind of justice can look like mercy, and how one message at an impossible hour can break a life—and make another kind of monster.
15 Chapters
