Due Process - Book 5: Pattern Recognition
In a justice system obsessed with outcomes, some truths are too orderly to challenge.
When analyst Mara Ellison begins to notice disturbing consistencies across unrelated criminal cases-custody events followed by rapid arrests, airtight evidence, and the same procedural endings-she does what the system allows: she documents. What she uncovers isn't corruption in the usual sense. It's something far more dangerous.
A pattern.
Police Chief Thomas Reed doesn't act out of chaos or cruelty. He acts with precision, selecting who will be removed and who will be blamed, using procedure itself as both weapon and shield. Prosecutors, judges, analysts, and officers don't conspire-they comply. Each decision is defensible. Each case is clean. And together, they form a machine that protects itself by working perfectly.
As public defenders lose the same way over and over, journalists publish stories that change nothing, and internal audits confirm exactly what they're designed to confirm, the system reveals its true strength: it can recognize the pattern and still choose continuity.
There are no secret cabals.
No dramatic revelations.
No easy villains.
Only process.
Only repetition.
Only inevitability.
Pattern Recognition is a restrained, razor-sharp procedural thriller about what happens when awareness is not enough-and when justice becomes indistinguishable from efficiency.
This is not a story about stopping the system.
It's about understanding why it doesn't need to be stopped to win.
Perfect for readers who appreciate grounded legal thrillers, institutional suspense, and morally unsettling realism in the vein of modern procedural fiction.
The case is closed.
The pattern remains.
