THE FOUNDER'S CIRCLE

The fire was supposed to end the questions. It almost ended him too.

Insurance investigator Marcus Webb comes to Garnet Valley for a simple claim: a two-million-dollar fire at an abandoned cannery, ruled electrical and closed in four days - too fast for a building this size. Then he finds a body in the wreckage, and an anonymous text warns him to go home before this stops being about insurance.

He doesn't go home.

Working with Detective Marisol Reyes - still reeling from the conspiracy that tore through Garnet Valley months earlier - Marcus follows a trail of accelerant patterns, burner phones, and a family's locked study straight toward the last person anyone expected: a deputy Marisol has trusted for six years, quietly groomed since he was nineteen to become the valley's next hired fixer. But someone is watching Marcus's every move. His motel room gets searched. His rental car goes up in flames while he watches, helpless, from twenty feet away. And the closer he gets to the truth, the clearer it becomes that unmasking one man only proves how much bigger this actually is.

The five founding families' fifty-year secret was never just local. It reaches into a state regulatory board, a network of buried safety complaints, and officials who vanish the moment anyone gets close. As one fixer falls, another is already gone - and the question is no longer who's protecting Garnet Valley's secret. It's how far does it actually go, and who's next.

The Founders' Circle is Book Two in The Garnet Valley Files, the serialized thriller series that began with What the Lake Kept. Each case closes. The town's fifty-year secret never does.

Perfect for readers who love:
- Small-town conspiracies with national-level stakes
- Investigator/detective partnerships under real, escalating threat
- Institutional corruption thrillers with no safe place to hide
- Series where each book raises the stakes instead of resetting them

The fire is out. The danger isn't. Read Book Two today.