FATAL Discontinuity

In police detective work, the continuity of the chain of evidence is everything. When that chain is broken, details are lost, misaligned, dismissed, or missed entirely. When that happens, it becomes a discontinuity - a break in the record where truth can disappear.

The newly installed law-enforcement AI system, LANTERN, was designed to find what human investigators miss. For months, it has quietly searched old files, active cases, forensic reports, sealed records, and forgotten evidence, drawing connections no one else had seen.

Detective Daniel Mercer has built his career on instinct, patience, and the uneasy knowledge that easy answers are often wrong. When LANTERN begins surfacing links between unrelated deaths, closed files, jurisdictional gaps, and decisions that should never have touched one another, Mercer sees something the system cannot explain: a pattern built from interruption.

As Mercer and Detective Laura Bennett follow the chain across precincts, archives, hospitals, legal offices, and cold cases, every answer exposes another break. Someone has learned how to exploit the places where systems fail to see each other. Someone has learned that when records do not connect, people disappear inside the spaces between them.

But LANTERN is not the only system watching.

What begins as an investigation into forgotten deaths becomes a search for the intelligence moving through the gaps - one that understands evidence, bureaucracy, money, and fear. The closer Mercer and Bennett come to the truth, the more they realize the case is not only about what was hidden. It is about what was deliberately severed.

And in those gaps, truth has been disappearing for years.

FATAL Discontinuity is a police tech noir novel about evidence, artificial intelligence, institutional failure, and the deadly spaces where context disappears.