Closure Rate: A Marcus Romano Investigation Some cases get solved. Some cases get managed.
San Francisco wakes to a body in a SoMa alley: Evan Whitlock, a wealthy, well-connected fund manager. Within hours, the machine is moving - press, brass, budget, urgency. Everyone wants this one closed, and closed clean. That same week, twenty-three-year-old student teacher Grace McAllister is found dead across town. No money. No connections. No headlines. Her file slides quietly into a drawer.
Detective Marcus Romano catches both.
Romano reads a crime scene the way other people read a room - slowly, completely, refusing to be hurried toward the convenient answer. And the convenient answer is exactly what everyone seems to want.
The longer he works the two cases, the more he understands the obstacle is not a simple cover-up. It is something quieter, and harder to fight: an institution that rewards certainty over accuracy, momentum over truth, and the death worth more over the death that is not.
Then the thread connecting his two victims surfaces - and with it, the person who decided he was owed a correction. Someone the city looked straight past for years. Someone who learned that being invisible is its own kind of power. Closure Rate is the debut of the Marcus Romano series: taut, intelligent crime fiction about what happens to the truth inside systems that were never built to protect it.
The most dangerous thing in any investigation is not the killer. It is momentum.
