They didn't break the law to kill her. They followed it.

Adrienne Sackett spent eleven years hidden. New name, new town, mail forwarded through a state program one week behind, every week. Her twelve-year-old daughter had never heard the old name.

Then a federal prosecutor complied with a disclosure statute, a transparency nonprofit published what it received, and a man eleven days out of prison read a public court docket and drove to her house.

Nobody committed a crime. That is the problem.

Attorney Maya Reeves wrote the law that made the disclosure mandatory. She wrote the rule that made the publication automatic. And when she traces the forty thousand pages back through the vendor who assembled them, she finds a company that bought itself out of receivership with money she failed to trace three years ago - now paid by the government to decide which documents leave which files.

Four million more pages are coming. Sixty-one protected people are somewhere inside them, and nine of those are children. Maya can publish and watch it happen again, or she can start deciding what the public is allowed to see - and become the exact thing she spent her career exposing.

The Candor Exception is a legal thriller about the gap between two good rules, and the woman who built both of them.

The Maya Reeves Legal Thrillers - standalone cases, one continuing spine. Book Four.