Nothing To See Here

Every client has a crisis. Every crisis has a lie.

A private island off the English coast. A stolen algorithm worth billions. Twelve guests who were promised five days of paradise and a host who's been planning this for six months longer than anyone knows.

When crisis management firm Vantage is called to tech billionaire Marcus Hale's exclusive retreat, the brief is simple: find the stolen technology before the guests leave the island. Discreet. Immediate. Contained.

But the brief is wrong.

There's a crew member in hospital with a head injury the file calls "unrelated." A CTO who looks like he hasn't slept in days. A guest file that should be twelve pages thick and contains exactly one, with a date that shouldn't exist. And a referral line in the intake file that nobody can trace: Referred by: a friend of the firm.

Marcus Hale invited twelve people to his private island. He controls the boats. He controls the network. He surrendered their phones at the dock. Now someone has stolen the most valuable piece of technology on the island, and what looked like corporate espionage is about to become something far worse.

Meet the team.

Nadia Calloway reads rooms. She catalogues every micro-expression, every nervous gesture, every lie that people tell with their wrists while their mouths say something else. She's the lead, the one who sees the pattern before it's a pattern. Her instincts are almost always right. The times they're wrong are the ones that haunt her.

James Osei-Mensah reads evidence. He finds truth in footnotes, in the details everyone else skips. Precise, methodical, and quietly devastating. When he removes his glasses, the room pays attention, because what follows changes everything. He's already noticed something about the referral. He's written it in a notebook nobody else knows about.

Rowan Sharp reads people. She makes the inappropriate joke at the crime scene and is right about something essential nobody else saw. The chaos is a system. The humour is armour. What's underneath is sharper than both. She was the first to notice the crew member's injury didn't add up. She won't be the last.

Together, they're the team you call before you call the police. Risk. Reputation. Resolution.
Twelve suspects. A sealed island with no way off. A locked server room that wasn't locked. A network breach that someone spent six months engineering. And a body count that's about to change everything the team thought they were here to do. The person who hired Vantage may be the most dangerous person in the room. And somewhere in twelve files on a glass table, there's a truth that none of them, not the team, not the guests, not even Marcus Hale himself, are prepared to find.

They were hired to find an algorithm. They're going to find something worse.

Nothing To See Here is the first book in the Vantage Mystery series, a gripping, witty, twist-filled mystery thriller set in sealed luxury environments where the wealthy and powerful have secrets worth killing for. Perfect for fans of Knives Out, The White Lotus, Only Murders in the Building, Agatha Christie's locked-room mysteries reimagined for the modern age, and the sharp-witted British crime fiction of Anthony Horowitz and Richard Osman.

A private island mystery with an ensemble cast, a structural twist you won't see coming, and a team of investigators you'll want to follow for twenty books.

Referred by: a friend of the firm.