EIGHT

Four men died in locked apartments, and none of them was ever there. No forced entry. No struggle. No blood. Four deadbolts thrown from the inside - and four men with no Social, no insurance, no license, and a landlord who only remembers that they were quiet. Michael is forty-five. He has a practice that takes four hours and pays for twelve, a body he keeps in shape for nobody, and a standing table at a coffee place on Amsterdam where he can sit three hours and nobody asks him anything. In nine days he sells the company he built. Before that, he wants to close a few things. The lieutenant working the case has noticed something he has not put in front of the task force: every one of the dead had a calm face. In his experience, a calm face is almost always a man who knew whoever came in. EIGHT is a slow-burn psychological thriller told from both sides of a closed door - the man building the case, and the man it is being built around. It is less interested in how the locks were thrown than in what it costs to be the kind of person who can throw them. For readers who like their suspense quiet, their narrators unreliable, and their endings earned.