CLEAN HANDS

Vienna. February. A dead intelligence officer nobody was supposed to find.

Marcus Webb was twenty-six years old, careful by nature, and good at his job. He varied his routes, ran his own counter-surveillance, and never gave anyone a reason to look twice. Seven months into his posting, he was found dead in a stairwell in the second district - two hours after an emergency extraction protocol was sent to five people who were supposed to protect him.

One of those five people killed him.

Counterintelligence officer Claire Novak has been sent to Vienna to find out which one.

The problem isn't the suspects. It's that she knows them. Specifically, she knows the man who built the cell, who recruited her for this investigation, and who has spent fifteen years being the kind of mentor you don't question. Fifteen years of safe houses and memos he wrote on her behalf when she was too junior to write them herself.

Fifteen years she has trusted Daniel Marsh completely.

Then a message arrives from a Washington number she doesn't recognize. Six words. Routed through three relay nodes.

He was running you from the start.

Claire knows how investigations work. She knows that suspicion without evidence is just narrative, and narrative is what gets people killed. She knows how to separate what the data shows from what her mind wants to make it show. She has built her entire career on that discipline.

She has never had to use it against someone she loved like family.

Clean Hands is a propulsive, psychologically precise spy thriller about the most dangerous kind of betrayal - the kind that wears the face of someone who earned your trust one careful year at a time.

For readers of smart, atmospheric intelligence fiction with moral weight, psychological complexity, and endings that don't let go.

Book 1 of the Claire Novak Thriller series. Book 2 coming soon.