REDUNDANCY PROTOCOL

A body in an underpass. Chalk numbers on the wall. And a killer who believes he's not murdering anyone - he's correcting them.

When underwriter Sophie Lund is found dead beneath Birmingham's Broad Street, DS Priya Nadkarni expects a standard case. What she gets instead is an equation: a birth date, a reduction, and four chilling words scrawled in chalk - NOT MASTER. CORRECTED.

Priya grew up rejecting the numerology her aunt practiced at a Sparkbrook market stall. Now it's the only language her killer speaks - and he knows her number too.

As the body count rises and the investigation peels back one family secret after another, Priya uncovers something far larger than a single offender: a belief system passed down like an inheritance, three generations deep, each one more patient and more dangerous than the last. To stop it, she'll have to do the one thing she's spent her whole career training for - and the one thing this family never learned to do.

Check the working. All of it. Including her own.

A tense, character-driven crime thriller for readers of Val McDermid, Karin Slaughter, and Richard Osman - where the numbers are never just numbers, and the most dangerous thing in the room is a man who's never once doubted himself.