THE ROOT CAUSE

In Seattle, the perfect murder looks like an accident. One man can tell the difference.

The 2026 World Cup has turned Seattle into a stage for the whole world. Ed Nowak - ex-Navy, running on too much coffee, the safety investigator nobody notices - isn't watching the matches. He's standing over a dead refrigeration worker in a plant full of ammonia, and what everyone is calling a tragic accident, Ed knows is murder.

Then a second body. A third. Each death is flawless - a fall, an arc-flash, a confined-space asphyxiation - built by someone who kills using the exact safety knowledge Ed has spent his life mastering. The police, leaned on by a city desperate not to spook the tournament, keep signing the easy answer. Ed won't.

Because the victims all touched the same thing: the industrial systems feeding a stadium that will soon hold sixty-eight thousand people - and Ed's own daughter is working the crowd downwind. Someone is erasing the only people who could stop a catastrophe engineered to look like an accident. With hours on the clock and no one left who believes him, Ed has to find the root cause before the whole city breathes it in.

A relentless, expertly detailed thriller for readers of Lee Child, Mark Greaney, and Vince Flynn - where the deadliest weapon of all is a clean story.