Plausible Deniability

He is a devoted husband. A little league coach. A digital marketing consultant who travels for work and always calls home. He is genuinely interested in the people he meets.

For ten years Robert Merritt has been building something alongside his carefully ordinary life. A methodology. A patience. A series of contacts that feel organic and accidental and are neither. He takes family vacations. He takes other things too. And nobody has ever been watching.

Sylvie Crain has spent fourteen years as a federal investigator learning to find what people hide. But it is not a case that sends her to her dead father's storage room in rural Missouri. It is a shoebox under a folding table behind the tax returns and a broken dehumidifier. Inside it are four objects that belong to someone else. And a name in her father's handwriting. Just three letters. Just a first name. Just Ann.

Now Sylvie is building two cases simultaneously. One she can show her supervisor. One she carries in a blue notebook she never lets out of reach. Both lead to Portugal.

To a beach in the old golden light.

To a man who will go very still when she sits down beside him.

To the only decision she has left to make.

Told in alternating second person voices that speak directly to the reader, Plausible Deniability is a literary thriller about the architecture of a hidden life, the cost of what we find when we look underneath everything else, and the specific weight of choosing silence over justice when both feel like a form of survival.

For readers of Gone Girl, We Need To Talk About Kevin, and A Little Life.

Nobody was ever watching.

Until someone was.