Every suspect has a perfect alibi. That's what should worry you.

When celebrated financier Max Halloran is found drowned at his villa on the Côte d'Azur, forensic investigator John Sharp is hired to do one thing: follow the money. What he finds instead is a Ponzi scheme mystery two decades in the making, and a sedative in Max's blood that did not administer itself.

The money trail becomes a financial thriller wrapped inside a literary crime fiction puzzle. Every name on Sharp's list is also a name on Max's victim list: the widow, the carrier, the bookkeeper, the recruiter, the old man by the lake. Each can account for themselves beautifully. Not one door will close.

The Trusted Man is a white collar crime thriller for readers who want their mysteries built on ledgers instead of fingerprints, a slow-burn, forensic investigator mystery where the real crime scene is a spreadsheet, and the real weapon is trust. Set against the discreet, sun-bleached menace of a French Riviera thriller, it follows Sharp through five suspects who each had motive, means, and an alibi worth believing.

But this is also an unreliable narrator mystery in the truest sense: not because anyone lies to the reader, but because the truth itself refuses to resolve. Sharp is warned, from his very first afternoon on the case, that the difficulty won't be finding the killer, it will be choosing one. He arrives, at last, at a verdict the whole architecture of the case was built to produce.

For readers of character-driven crime fiction who don't need every thread tied off, who'd rather sit with an ending that feels true than one that feels tidy, The Trusted Man is a mystery about the price of being trusted, and the impossibility of ever being sure.