Sleight of Hand

Lane Lamore notices what other people file and forget. It's what ended a forty-year water rights fraud on the Colorado River. It's what a thirty-two year old Delaware lawyer read about her in a newspaper and decided to make her the perfect name to put on a fraudulent LLC - isolated, credible in this world, working alone. The kind of name that would absorb consequences and not respond. He was right about everything except the last part. When the IRS attributes $340,000 in unreported income to Lane's Social Security number, she traces it in hours to a shell entity one word off from a legitimate Colorado water rights fund - a misnamed ghost built to skim administrative fees from forty-one million dollars in senior water rights and disappear before anyone looked across the whole record at once. The architect is Preston Hale. He's in Wilmington. He doesn't know Lane is looking. She has weeks before the audit finding goes public and he moves the money and leaves her name on a cold trail. She has a tax lawyer who answers questions he wasn't asked and knows water rights law better than the people trying to unravel it. She has a banker who approved the wrong transactions for the wrong reasons and is ready to put it down. And she has the same trick Preston used - except she controls the infrastructure underneath the name. Sleight of Hand is the second Lane Lamore novel.