COLD TRAIL

"The dead don't haunt us because they can't forgive us. They haunt us because we can't forgive ourselves."

She spent twelve years believing Jonas Veld died because the mission failed.

She was wrong.

CIA officer Claire Novak has been carrying the story she was given - a clean narrative about a compromised network, an enemy too fast to stop, and a field officer who simply ran out of time. It was the kind of loss this work produced. Terrible, but comprehensible.

Then a message arrives through a dead channel she forgot she'd left open. Eleven words. A photograph. And a question that cracks the story down the middle.

Jonas wasn't caught.
He was handed over.

Now Claire is operating without authorization - no backup, no cover, no one she can fully trust inside the building - moving through the winter streets of Oslo and Prague with a shrinking window before Langley finds out she's looking. What she's uncovering reaches higher than she imagined: a betrayal woven into the architecture of American intelligence itself, protected for twelve years by the man now sitting at the top of it.

She has the evidence. She has the witnesses. She has the documents a dead man left behind for someone he trusted to find them.

What she doesn't have is time.

Because the people who buried the truth once are still watching. And they know she's close.

Cold Trail is a razor-sharp espionage thriller about loyalty, buried proof, and what it costs to carry the wrong version of the truth for twelve years - and then do something about it.

Perfect for fans of morally complex, character-driven intelligence fiction. Can be read as a standalone, though readers of the series will find deeper resonance.

The Claire Novak Thriller Series
Book One: Clean Hands
Book Two: Deep Water
Book Three: Cold Trail