A letter from Helsinki. A secret buried for thirty years. A network prepared to kill everyone who knows the truth.
When Lisbon document conservator Zara Carell receives a clandestine package from a terrified archivist, she discovers that forgotten shipping records from the aftermath of the Balkan wars conceal something far darker than financial corruption.
The Mediterranean routes were never simply trade corridors. They led to hidden facilities where witnesses disappeared, weapons changed hands, and human lives became entries in an international ledger. Now someone is erasing the evidence.
With former operative Declan Farr at her side, Zara follows the trail from the rain-soaked docks of Lisbon to Athens and the dangerous waters of the Aegean. Waiting for them is Marko Ilić — a man Zara remembers from a war neither of them has truly escaped — and a powerful syndicate determined to auction its darkest secrets before destroying every trace of them.
The archives are burning.
The witnesses are still alive.
And Zara has less than seventy-two hours to make the past impossible to bury again.
For decades, a network of shipping companies, offshore accounts, military logistics records, and forgotten maritime facilities has concealed the truth about people who vanished during, and long after, the Balkan wars. Then a frightened Helsinki archivist steals the documents that can expose everything. The evidence reaches Zara Carell in Lisbon and almost immediately, people begin dying.
Pulled back into a world she thought she had left behind, Zara joins Declan Farr in a pursuit stretching from Portugal to Greece. Their investigation uncovers secret detention sites, missing witnesses, Swiss money, stolen navigation plates, and an extraordinary maritime auction where some of Europe's most dangerous people intend to sell the remains of a thirty-year criminal empire.
But the man protecting that empire knows Zara.
Colonel Marko Ilić remembers the old war. And this time, he intends to leave no witnesses at all.
A tense international conspiracy thriller about memory, evidence, and the terrible price of refusing to let the dead disappear.
104 Pages
40,491 Words
Illustrated
