His father left him everything. Including the part someone needs to disappear.
Warren Kessler hadn’t spoken to his father in twenty-two years when the call came: the old man was dead, intestate, and Warren was the sole heir to a sagging bungalow in Grand Rapids, two thin bank accounts, and a rented storage unit.
Inside the unit is a workshop. Inside the workshop is a quiet, careful business — estate-sale furniture turned into antiques with forged maker’s marks and invented histories, sold to collectors who never asked the right questions. Ray had been at it for fourteen years.
Broke and cornered, Warren tells himself he’ll just finish what was already in motion. Clear the inventory, settle the debts, walk away. He knows what it is. He does it anyway.
What he doesn’t know is that his father’s last buyer needs those records gone — and that a tired probate attorney three floors up at the county courthouse keeps finding the same name in two unrelated estate files.
A noir about paper trails, inherited crimes, and the things a man cannot bring himself to do while he’s alive. For readers of James M. Cain and Patricia Highsmith. No detectives. No clean endings. Only the bill.
