The Whisper and Runaway

Some cities eat their witnesses. Detroit just makes them disappear.When fifteen-year-old foster kid Marley Stevenson overhears the wrong conversation in a Detroit public library, she doesn't know the name of the man who saw her hear it. She learns it fast. Mark Freeling is a fixer, the kind who moves through a city like water, patient and inevitable, and he has just handed a city official authorization to silence a journalist named Vivienne Marsh.Now Marsh is being hunted. And so is Marley.With the police chasing a false robbery report filed by the Deputy Mayor and Freeling's men working the grid between them, Marley has two assets: a sketchbook full of evidence and a cryptic message on a phone app that shouldn't exist.You are not the only one watching him.In Detroit's shadow economy, where information moves through Night Market stalls and dead drops in library books, two people are already in motion. Jackie Rage, who built her reputation on knowing everything and selling only what won't get anyone killed. And an old man in a forgotten basement who has been watching this city's corruption for fifty years, since before the internet, since before anyone thought to call it a network.He calls himself the Whisper.He doesn't call himself a hero.A modern noir mystery set in the bones of a city that never stopped fighting, THE WHISPER AND THE RUNAWAY is for readers who like their justice quiet, their tradecraft real, and their moral lines drawn in pencil.