The Killing Fields: The Beginning

Detective Lance Mason knows how the system fails the vulnerable... because he used to be one of them. When eighteen-year-old Lexi Jameson goes missing after a campus coffee date, Lance discovers patterns that don’t add girls tied to foster care, abortion clinic rumors, a nightclub owner with too many secrets, and someone who leaves a grisly signature in the fields. As he follows the thread from coffee shops to abandoned barns, he unearths collusion he never expected... informants who lie, a retiring cop who looks the other way, and a community that would rather not know the truth.

Time runs out when a surveillance clip surfaces showing Lexi with a young man who isn’t who he seems. As Lance pieces together the lives behind the missing—a social worker’s guilt, a foster mother’s devotion, an abuser’s charm—he must confront how far some will go to keep the past buried. The rescue will demand everything he’s kept bottled up and a reckoning that could cost him his job, or his life.

This is a prequel ("Book 0") in the Chronicles of Iniquity Series.