Due Diligence

The engagement arrives the way they always do: quiet, careful, a single family trust and a respected bank and a question that should have a clean answer. It does not have a clean answer. What Aldridge and the firm pull from the first thread runs three decades deep, hidden behind an impeccable institutional face, and belongs to people who do not answer questions - they answer the people who ask them.

The work is what it has always been: read carefully, tell the truth without cruelty, build on nothing you cannot prove. But this case asks more of that discipline than any the firm has taken. It comes into the office in a way no case has before. It puts its hand on one of them. And it runs closer than any of them yet knows to the older thing Aldridge has carried since before the firm existed - the thread that has waited eleven years for its ground, and that this case, quietly, begins to move.

Due Diligence is a book about surfaces - the respectable face an institution shows the world, and how that face is not a decoration on the corruption but its most essential working part. It is about trusting reasonably and being betrayed anyway, and the difference, which turns out to be everything, between a foolish trust and a sensible one exploited. And it is about the cost, to the one who does the work right, of being the person who says what is under the surface.

Meticulous, restrained, and quietly devastating, the fifth novel in The Associates series is less about catching the guilty than about what it takes to tell the truth about them - cleanly, and at a price.