The Rule of Silence: Kate Malloy, #1

Kate Malloy knows who did it. She has no way to say so.

Seventeen years into a career built on procedure, Kate is appointed to defend Marcus Webb — a bartender who found a woman's body in an alley, called 911, checked her pulse, and left his fingerprints on her neck doing it. The State has him on that, and on very little else.

Kate does what she always does: she works the file. A left-hand print on a right-handed man. A sedative in the victim's blood that never reached the press. A witness statement that was in her file in the morning and gone by the afternoon.

Then the case stops being about Marcus Webb.

Rachel Mays was twenty-six and a journalist, and what she was writing when she died was a story about public money moving quietly through a charitable fund. On that fund's board is the woman who built Kate's firm and taught Kate everything she knows. In a restaurant's reservation book, six weeks before Rachel died, is the name of the firm's largest client.

None of it can be used. Not in court, not in a filing, not out loud — because of how it reached her, and because using it would destroy the man she is paid to defend.

THE RULE OF SILENCE is a legal thriller in which the danger is not violence but procedure: a disciplinary complaint filed anonymously, a witness who stops returning calls, a document that quietly leaves a folder. Kate wins her case. What that costs her, and what it does not fix, is the rest of the book.

Book one of the Kate Malloy novels. Approximately 23,000 words.