Dead Drop

Some secrets aren't kept. They're passed.

Six months after the events of Burn Bag, Corbin Hale is trying to rebuild the life he almost destroyed. His machine shop is still standing. His son is still asking questions. His lawyer is still keeping him alive. And the government room that once buried his testimony is finally beginning to crack.

Then a part arrives at Hale Precision Works.

It is stainless steel. Perfectly machined. Wrong by exactly half a degree.

Hidden inside the metal is a message only Corbin would know how to read: a date, a set of coordinates, and three words that turn every record in the case into a threat.

Custody is not truth.

The trail leads to an abandoned lock on the Green River, a fugitive custodian with his own version of justice, and a successor system that does not preserve secrets - it erases witnesses before they can become records.

As a Senate hearing approaches and the evidence chain begins to fracture, Corbin, Wyatt Hale, Nora Bell, and the surviving witnesses must decide who can be trusted with the truth when every file, every name, and every memory has been touched by men who know how to make history disappear.

Dead Drop is Book Two in the Corbin Hale thriller series: a grounded conspiracy thriller about evidence, family, betrayal, and the machinery of silence.