Some cases don’t stay buried—especially when the courthouse is hiding them.

Federal judge Everett Langford has spent a career guarding the line between law and chaos. His days are measured in motions, rulings, and carefully controlled words from the bench—until a letter arrives from death row inmate Thomas Corbett, accusing Langford’s own court of getting it catastrophically wrong.

The details in Corbett’s letter shouldn’t be possible. Affidavits that never made the record. A witness everyone forgot. A piece of evidence that was logged, then quietly erased. As Everett starts checking, he finds ghosts in the docket: missing pages, unexplained edits, and a paper trail that loops back through long marble corridors and closed-door chambers.

With the clock ticking toward Corbett’s execution date, Everett must decide how much of his reputation, his friendships on the bench, and the court’s own legacy he’s willing to put on trial.

• Atmospheric judicial thriller set inside a federal courthouse that feels alive—and complicit.
• Follows Judge Everett Langford as he becomes the one under scrutiny.
• Perfect for readers who love long corridors, buried drafts, and the question: what if the verdict was built on a lie?