The First Call

He found their mistake. They set the trap.

John Thorn is the youngest partner his accounting firm has ever made. Careful, unremarkable, and very good at reading a balance sheet, which is how he notices the one transaction that should not exist: a payment routed through a shell company three days before a bombing that made someone very rich.

He does the sensible thing. He asks his brother, a former intelligence operative, to take a look.

Twelve hours later, there is a federal agent in his office. By nightfall, John and the woman he was about to propose to are the two faces on every news broadcast in America, named as domestic terrorists, hunted by a counterterrorism system that has never been wrong.

They do not need to catch him. They only need the machinery of the state to keep looking.

They own it.

John Thorn is not a soldier and not a spy. He has no training, no contacts, and no idea how to disappear. What he has is a storage unit his brother filled seven years ago, a mind built to find the number that does not belong.

From a Los Angeles high-rise to a high-stakes run through the West. And the further they get, the clearer it becomes that the system hunting them was not corrupted by accident. It was built that way.

The First Call is the first book in a shared universe in which the stories stand alone, but the consequences do not.

For readers of John Grisham, Harlan Coben, Joseph Finder, and Brad Meltzer.