The Conciliator

Fourteen thousand feet above the Chesapeake, on live television, Senator Shawn Burke watched his wife's parachute come apart.

The jump was his campaign's idea - a stunt for the six o'clock feeds, a presidential frontrunner and his wife falling together out of a clear Maryland sky. By the second morning, grief had a poll number attached to it. Within days, Shawn was indicted for her murder.

The evidence says sabotage. The polls say guilty. And his lawyer has a plan the whole room knows is reckless: put him on The Conciliator, the show where the accused face a studio audience and a live meter that swings, minute by minute, between innocent and guilty.

It works. That's the problem.

Because the host across from him is no stranger. And the secret Shawn keeps denying on camera may be the reason his wife is dead.

As a feuding federal task force, an FBI agent who quit rather than bury the case, and a private investigator who used to work Baltimore homicide close in on what really happened at SkyHaven, the witnesses start dying - and Shawn learns that the show saving his campaign has a verdict of its own in mind.

A thriller about the two courts every accused man now faces, and what it costs to be acquitted in only one of them.