The Last Ledger: He kept the real numbers for thirty years. It cost him the last ten days of his life.* (The Vale & Ward Files Book 6)

He kept the real numbers for thirty years. Someone made sure they’d die with him.
Warren Kessler was seventy-one, a retired bookkeeper with a bad heart everyone had been braced for. When he’s found dead in his own armchair, the ruling takes minutes: a heart attack, exactly on schedule. Case closed before it opens.
Except Warren wrote a letter four days before he died — to a reporter, promising something that would “finally balance the books.” Detective Cassandra Vale can’t let a promise like that go unread. And when the medical examiner takes a second look, the numbers don’t add up either: a heart medication dosed just a little too high, for just a little too long, by someone who knew exactly how much Warren trusted them.
The trail leads back thirty years, to a shipping company that laundered money nobody was ever supposed to notice, and forward, to a debt someone was willing to kill to erase. Cass’s perfect memory holds the one page no one else can read anymore — a ledger, burned the night Warren died, that she saw once, weeks earlier, without knowing what she was looking at. Reconstructing it means reconstructing a murder no one believed happened, against a family running out of places to hide what they owe.
The Last Ledger is the sixth Vale & Ward File — a fair-play thriller about debt, guilt, and the kind of math that never stops being owed. New readers can start here.
One-click and see if you can balance the books before she does.