DELANEY'S PAYBACK: A Mike Delaney Thriller - Book One

Two years of silence ended with a phone call Mike Delaney never wanted to answer. Colleen Delaney is dead—found in her apartment, ruled an overdose by a coroner who never knew her. Delaney knows the ruling is wrong before he's even finished reading it. His sister couldn't watch a flu shot go in without leaving the room. She didn't touch drugs.

And hours before she died, she'd sent him one line, the first message either of them had sent the other in months: call me, it's about Dad's old case. Their father was a customs supervisor at the Port of New Orleans, a man who'd walked cargo cranes for thirty years without so much as a stumble—until the calm Tuesday morning he fell from one and died.

The port called it an accident. Colleen never believed that, not for a single day of the eight years since. Delaney stopped believing it with her a long time ago, and told her so, in words he's spent every day since regretting.

Two years of near-silence between them started there, in that disagreement, and neither of them found their way back from it before it was too late. He didn't know she'd kept digging anyway.

Working logistics at Crescent Maritime, Colleen had spent the last year of her life quietly cross-referencing shipping manifests against customs filings, and what she found wasn't a clerical error. It was a pattern—six containers, then more, weights that didn't match paperwork that should have caught it and never did.

The same shape of wrongness that took their father. She'd copied it to a thumb drive, hidden it in a coffee tin on her office shelf, and texted her brother to come back into her life just before someone made sure she never got the chance to hand it over. A skip tracer by profession, Delaney has spent his career finding people who don't want to be found.

Grief turns that skill inward: toward his sister's last weeks, his father's last morning, and a case file the department closed twice without ever really looking at it. What he finds waiting for him is a sm