A Decade of Beads

By A. W. Keating

A logistics chain is co-opted for crime. Bainbridge, Illinois is its hub. It's about to come crumbling down.

Lizzy Waldron built her career out of manifests and margins; Forest Frost's was built on lies and regret.

When a body washes up with a Midwest Logistics badge, the quiet work of moving parcels unravels into a machine built to move more than appliances. Detective Emerit Baker follows the crumbs: a rubberized lot, line-hauls rerouted to empty parking lots, a barge with hidden compartments, and a savant who can visualize the entire operation's flow.

What begins as an investigation becomes a reckoning. The people who held this network together-drivers, managers, and those who did the dirty work-may be clever, but they are not invisible. To stop the chain, Emerit must use the very humanity Lizzy avoids: leverage, compromise, and an appeal for redemption that could free them-or ruin them. Who pays the tab when survival is a business model?

A noir-tinged unraveling of a trafficking network that hides inside ordinary commerce. A moral thriller that asks whether survival justifies the compromises that people make-and who gets left paying the price.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: B0GNGN9MVJ
• ISBN13: 9798994720912
• Release Date: March 2026
• Publisher: Specksnyder Press
• Length: 330 Pages
• Weight: 0.84 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.7" x 5.5" x 8.5"