Fifth Column: A Nica Duarte Thriller: 5

For seventy years, something has been reading our children through the tests we trust. It just graded the wrong girl.Miami night-shift sergeant Nica Duarte has closed four impossible cases by one doctrine: count the children first. But the fifth war begins with a wrong answer - a pattern hidden inside a standardized test, discovered by a child who was never supposed to see it.Because inside the world's most trusted examinations rides a fifth column: unmarked pages that read for one thing only. The rarest kind of gifted child. The kind nobody would miss.The finder never kills. It never kidnaps. It refers - and for three generations, its referrals have been priced, listed, and sold. Now its files show a priority two years overdue: Referral 143. A thirteen-year-old girl who read the test back, vanished into her own paperwork, and has been beating the machine at its own game ever since - alone, exhausted, and running out of moves.To catch a thing that finds children, Nica's family must do the unthinkable: build a child of their own. A perfect ghost, made of arranged truth, dangled into the machine's stream. And they must win a race no one has ever won - reaching the girl before the buyer does.But the girl has conditions. And the machine has a client older than the machine itself.Fifth Column is Book 5 in the Nica Duarte series - a race-the-machine thriller about the tests we trust, the children nobody counts, and a family that sets the table before it knows your name. Short chapters. Big heart. One empty desk that changes everything.