Today, the case opens.
Lethal Design, Book 2 in the KC & Orlando Prime crime thriller series, is available now.
This is an investigation built from deaths that look routine, evidence divided among separate teams, and one pattern no investigator can see alone.
A Pattern No Single Team Can See
Successful professionals with no history of addiction begin dying along eerily similar paths.
At first, nothing clearly connects them. Each death can be explained. Each file can be closed. And each investigative team has only one part of the evidence.
OPD Major Crimes detective Kylie “KC” Cassidy, Orlando Prime, and federal investigators must compare what they know before the full danger becomes visible.
The case does not turn on one miraculous clue. It builds as details accumulate, assumptions are challenged, and investigators who usually work separate cases realize they may be hunting the same calculating killer.
The Case Frank Never Left Behind
For Orlando Prime investigator Frank Travers, the pattern is not only professional.
It may reach back to the unsolved murder of his wife, Linda.
Frank has lived with that cold case for years. Now he must decide whether the new evidence is finally pointing toward the truth, or whether grief is making him see the connection he has always wanted to find.
His team cannot simply follow his certainty. They have to test it.
That tension sits at the heart of Lethal Design: how do investigators trust experience without letting the past decide what the evidence means?
New Readers Can Enter Here
Although Lethal Design is Book 2 in the KC & Orlando Prime series, the central investigation begins and resolves in this book.
Readers of Fatal Invitation will recognize the team and the relationships already forming among them. Readers of the Mirror Estate series may also catch a few connections to Stolen Secrets.
Neither series is required reading. You can enter the investigation with Lethal Design and follow the case from its first questions to its final answers.
The Case Is Open
Lethal Design is available now.
Want a spoiler-free look at the atmosphere behind the investigation? Watch the official Lethal Design trailer.
You can also read the free Frank-and-Linda bonus scene for a glimpse of the case Frank has never been able to leave behind.
Release notes, reader extras, and future case files go to readers through the S.F. Baumgartner list. Join the reader list for the next investigation.
Which would pull you into the case first: the apparently routine deaths, the scattered evidence, or Frank’s unresolved cold case?