THE ALIBI ENGINE: A Novel of Digital Deception and Reasonable Doubt

Defense attorney Erin Shaw has seen plenty of hopeless cases. She's never seen one like this. Her client, Marcus Webb, stands accused of beating a city technology auditor to death in her own kitchen - and the case against him should be simple. A financial grudge. A documented safety complaint she ignored. His van, parked three blocks away, at exactly the wrong time. Then Erin's investigator finds something that should have cleared him instantly: eleven separate security cameras, scattered across Chicago, all placing Marcus somewhere else entirely during the murder window. An airtight alibi. A gift. Except a forensic analyst notices something that shouldn't be possible. Only one of the eleven recordings is real. The other ten were generated - invented, frame by frame - by Continuum, the city's new AI system built to fill the gaps left by thousands of broken surveillance cameras. A system police and prosecutors have quietly trusted as real evidence for two years. A system somebody has learned to manipulate. As Erin dismantles the sudden, convenient certainty behind her own client's defense, she uncovers a truth far larger than one murder: a pattern of fabricated footage stretching across the city, and a killer who understood, better than anyone, exactly how much a courtroom is willing to believe a screen. Somebody built Marcus Webb the perfect alibi. Erin has to find out why - before the truth of what really happened disappears into the same silence Continuum was built to erase. A gripping techno-thriller for readers of legal suspense and surveillance-state fiction, The Alibi Engine asks the question every courtroom will eventually have to answer: when the evidence is generated instead of witnessed, how do you ever prove what's real?