Mystery

A reporter's job ends at the byline. Yours doesn't. Pin the right name before dawn — you only get to say it once.

Sal Donato washed up at Pier 9 with a notebook full of names and a tag on his toe. You're Frankie Cole — night-desk reporter, friend, rival — and you've got until dawn to beat the cops to the killer. Three suspects, one accusation, and every word out of their mouths is a half-lie.

You married the name. Now find out what's left of it — before they find out you looked.

You married into the Hallorans — a name carved into university buildings and hospital wings. Twelve people at your first family dinner, silverware older than your hometown, and a document in your spouse's study that says the fortune is three bad quarters from a fire sale. They don't know you know.

The files nobody wanted are the ones somebody buried. Start reading.

You are the entire cold case unit: one detective, one flooded basement, four decades of files nobody was supposed to reopen. Every case is a real, solvable arc — and every closure makes the city remember your name, and makes somebody upstairs wish it had stayed forgotten.

Three hundred and sixty-five nights. Forty rooms. The house is keeping its own count.

A relative you've never heard of has left you a forty-room manor on the moors, on one condition: live in it for a full year. Each wing is its own haunting with its own rules — and every room you reclaim stays reclaimed, lit, and yours. Mostly.

Wear his face, keep his girlfriend fooled, finish the job — and try not to fall in love with the life you stole.

You are not human. You replace people. This morning you woke up wearing Danny Rourke's face, in Danny Rourke's bed, next to a woman who has loved him for four years — and you have eleven hours to do the thing you were sent here to do. Every conversation is a test. You inherited his debts, his grudges, and his people. Not his memories.

You're the only one who's seen this before — now prove it, before the last road out of town stops mattering.

A retired doctor and former detective is the only one who recognizes the swollen lymph nodes and blackening skin for what they are: the Black Death, loose in a modern town that refuses to believe it. Treat the sick, trace the source, and seal Ashbrook before the plague finds the road out.