In the Serpent’s Ruin

Washington has always rewarded the ruthless. But when a former senator is found dead in a high-rise apartment — the case quickly buried beneath a veneer of official sympathy — the carefully constructed world of President Vivienne Rourke begins to fracture at its edges.

Her nephew Caleb knows the machine better than anyone. He helped build it. Now, hunted and framed, he moves through the city’s shadows alongside Zane Maddox, a man whose particular skills were once Vivienne’s greatest asset. Watching from within the administration, Tessa Rourke catalogs every mistake her cousin makes — and Vivienne is beginning to make them.

Into this world of buried evidence and leveraged secrets steps Beau Whitfield Jr., a man with no taste for politics and every reason to enter the arena. He doesn’t understand the full depth of what he’s walking into. That may be the only thing that keeps him alive.

As a presidential election draws closer, loyalties fracture, old debts come due, and the surveillance architecture Vivienne spent decades constructing turns out to have a flaw she never anticipated: the people who know where all the bodies are buried have finally stopped being afraid of her.

Ambition, it turns out, is an excellent teacher — until it isn’t.