She was hired to investigate him. He knew it before she walked through the door. He let her in anyway.
Zara Mehta does not make mistakes.
She is twenty-six, forensic, and exactly as dangerous as the companies who hire her to expose other people's secrets deserve. She has spent three years building a case against Voss Global's darkest subsidiary ? quietly, methodically, alone. She has a file. She has evidence. She has a name pencilled in a margin that connects a weapons-patent in 2003 to a jetty in Pune to a death her family was told was an accident.
She does not make mistakes.
She is about to make Ronan Voss.
Ronan Voss has spent his entire adult life being the wrong brother. Too loud. Too charming. Too drunk at the wrong dinners. What nobody in his family has understood ? what nobody was supposed to understand ? is that every fire he has started has been deliberate. Ronan Voss has been, for two and a half years, hunting the same monster Zara is hunting. From the opposite end of the same maze.
He has also, for eleven months, been watching her coming.
He has also, for eleven months, not had a drink.
He is, at eight-twenty-seven on a Tuesday morning, going to let her walk into his boardroom and believe she has the advantage.
It is the last generous thing he will do for a very long time.
What does it cost a woman to trust a man who has been lying to her since before they met?
What does it cost a man to love a woman who was sent to destroy him ? and choose her anyway?
What is written, in pencil, in the margin of a file that connects two families across three continents and twenty-five years?
What happened on a jetty in Pune at six-fifty-three in the morning ? and who, in a grey flat above a Geneva bookshop, has been waiting for someone brave enough to come and hear the answer?
And what does the engraved Z on the inside of an emerald ring mean ? when the man who had it sized knew her hand from a photograph eleven months before she arrived?
The Book is the darker and devastating and completely readable as a standalone. It is an a fake engagement that becomes the realest thing either of them has ever done, and a hero who is quietly, daily, choosing sobriety and love in a genre that almost never asks its men to do either.
This is not a soft love story.
It is a forensic one.
Two people. One maze. The same monster at the centre of it.
And a ransom that was never going to be paid in money.
