CJ EVANS
The Vouching
A picture crosses his desk that is too clean. No gap, no wrinkle, no corner that won’t lie flat. Everything Luke Landry has been trained to trust says it’s real — and that training is the trap. Certainty can be manufactured. And the one truth he was never taught to check is the story of himself.
The Vouching is the third novel in C.J. Evans’s An Acceptable Sacrifice series — a quiet, exact story of certainty, inheritance, and what a man’s word is worth once he has learned what it can cost.
CJ EVANS
The Second Factor
A drone comes in low through a propped side door and opens a canister over a room of ninety people. The woman it was aimed at is still talking when it happens. She lives. Two people behind her don’t.
By morning, an intelligence analyst named Luke Landry has been handed a name he was never supposed to have.
The official account is written in four days by one analyst under pressure — and it’s good. Clean, sourced, carefully argued, believed by everyone who reads it. It says a foreign government reached across an ocean and did this.
Luke has the machine on a table in front of him, and the machine says something else. A bracket cut by hand. Not a state supply chain. A workshop.…