Breakwater

A man who mails his secrets to himself does not shoot himself and then fold away the glasses he needed to see the gun.

Detective Sergeant Cora Bishop knows Harlan Vetch was murdered the moment she sees his study: the wrong contact angle, no spatter on his hand, a note that says nothing a careful old records clerk would ever have let stand as his last word. For six months Vetch had been Bishops off-book source, quietly helping her pull loose a sealed ownership trust behind Port Salishs port scheme, and he died the week he found the name behind it.

The case forces open a door Bishop has kept shut for four years: the staged domestic call that sent her partner Tom Vasey into a warehouse and never let him out. As she and Detective Theo Ruiz trace an old dispatch override, a wiped hard drive, and a chain of mailed originals a dead man trusted more than any department system, they find a leak reading their every move from inside their own case, someone close enough to see the file before Bishop does. The commander who authorized the reopening is suspended. The one clean document that could prove who owns the trust is thrown out on a warrant technicality engineered by hands Bishop cannot yet name. She is left running the most dangerous investigation of her career with a mole at her back and a killer who knows the department better than she does.

Breakwater is the third book in The Port Salish Cases: a morally serious, atmospheric police procedural that closes an arc four years in the making: a detective who reads what a room is missing, a rot that reached higher than any single arrest could touch, and the costly, unglamorous truth of who sent Tom Vasey into that warehouse, and why.