I put my own name on the villain's list of suspects. That's when I knew the book was working.
Shadow Code starts with a man closing the biggest case of his career. A laundering network, years in the making, taken apart piece by piece. He gets one night to feel good about it.
Then a body turns up in a villa in Phuket, and the exact same money starts moving again. Same rhythm. Same fingerprints. A system built to catch criminals is now running one.
Here's the part I didn't see coming while writing it. The tools being used aren't stolen or reverse-engineered. They're his. Nobody guesses that well by accident.
So the question stops being who did this and turns into something worse.
Did they study him from a distance? Or did they sit across the table from him for years, close enough to watch him build the thing they're now using against him.
I've spent enough nights in operation rooms watching numbers lie convincingly to know that feeling doesn't leave you. Shadow Code is what happens when it finally gets to finish the sentence.
It's live now. Read the first chapter and tell me you don't start double-checking who has access to your systems.