Three Little Birds

She reads lips. They erase lives.

Sally Raines went to prison for poisoning her father. She doesn't deny it. He put her mother in a coma, and Sally knew he wasn't finished.

Deaf since a childhood illness that killed her brother, she has spent her life reading faces, hands, and mouths. She notices what people say when they think no one is listening. It makes her very good at finding fraud, and dangerous to the wrong people.

Recently released, Sally builds a forensic accounting firm with the two women who helped her survive Hazelton, now her closest friends. Navi is a gifted hacker who can slip into almost any system, though people are harder for her to read. Cricket brings the streetwise instincts that kept them alive in prison and the fierce loyalty that keeps them together now.

They're building their firm, one client at a time, when a job at one of the city's most respected investment firms turns up numbers no one else questions. But Sally knows they're wrong, and she can't leave it alone.

What follows puts the people she loves in the line of fire: the mentor who vouched for her and the grandfather who took her in. A probation officer searches for a reason to send her back inside. Behind it all are men who have spent decades learning that money makes problems disappear. They look at three ex-convicts and see people nobody will miss.

They're wrong about that.