Insider Threat

When cybersecurity professional Seth Parker discovers a hidden surveillance program buried in the defense contractor network he's protected for fifteen years, he uncovers something far more dangerous than a data breach. The system, code-named SENTINEL, was built from the ruins of ALTAR - the AI manipulation engine that journalists Claire Hensley and Elise Marston exposed in a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigation. But where ALTAR manufactured synthetic relationships to exploit individuals, SENTINEL predicts and neutralizes anyone the government deems a threat - journalists, researchers, activists, congressional staffers - using the same intimate knowledge of human vulnerability, now backed by institutional power. As Seth risks everything to get the truth to Claire, and Claire and Elise reunite to investigate a conspiracy that has been quietly dismantling their careers and lives for eighteen months, they discover that the system designed to protect the American people has been turned against them - and that exposing it may cost them far more than their careers. The Insider Threat is the second novel in the series that began with Stolen Trust, exploring what happens when the most dangerous threat to democracy isn't a foreign adversary or a rogue corporation, but the machinery of power hiding inside the institutions we trust.