Above My Pay Grade

ABOVE MY PAY GRADE

A legacy of silence. A valley of secrets. A debt that has finally come due.

On a warm October evening in a glass-walled Los Angeles art gallery, billionaire Franklin Marshall collapses and dies in front of two hundred elite witnesses. The cause: a rare, fast-acting toxin delivered through a single, brined oyster. Marshall, a man who built empires by controlling the supply, was weeks away from making a confession that would have dismantled the lives of the most powerful men in Washington-starting with Senator Theodore Whitmore.

Jamie Rodriguez, a sixteen-year-old high school journalist with a homemade press badge and a relentless drive for the truth, is the first on the scene. What she discovers is not just a murder, but a thirty-year cover-up of an environmental crime that has poisoned a community.

Joined by Sam Liu, whose mother has spent six years working inside Marshall's empire to document the truth, Jamie follows a paper trail that leads from the glittering heights of Bel Air to a fog-wrapped cabin in Humboldt County. There, they find the man who knows where the bodies are buried-and the memo that proves the contamination was no accident.

As the clock ticks down to a backroom political deal designed to bury the evidence forever, Jamie and Sam must decide how much they are willing to risk to give a voice to twelve hundred people who have been told for twenty years that their sickness was a coincidence.

In a world where justice is often considered above one's pay grade, two girls are about to prove that the truth has no price tag.