Aniya Hawke: Midnight Artist

By Samuel DenHartog

In a city where every surface can become a screen, four breathtaking murals appear over several nights across San Francisco, each one alive with augmented reality and quiet, natural beauty. Then the artist behind them, Marisol Quintero, is found executed in an alley beneath her final wall. Detective Aniya Hawke arrives before dawn, and the case quickly becomes a race against a story that is already spreading faster than evidence can be collected.

Aniya's neural link makes her fast, but it does not make the city patient. Public feeds ignite, rumors harden into "facts," and someone begins erasing Marisol's trail from the inside out. When Aniya follows the murals' hidden logic, she collides with a century-old legend, Emperor Norton, and a paper trail tied to a defunct gold mining company. The deeper she digs, the clearer it becomes that Marisol was building a public puzzle meant to be solved, and someone was willing to kill to claim the prize first.

With her partner Matthew Miles at her side, and the line between history and motive collapsing by the hour, Aniya must outthink a suspect who moves with discipline and plans for blind spots. The clues lead from downtown alleys to Colma pilgrimages, from dusty archives to a sealed site at the edge of the city's memory. The murals were meant to reveal a forgotten truth. Instead, they have set off a hunt where every answer makes the next question more dangerous.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: B0GQQ1ZG3R
• ISBN13: 9798250230735
• Release Date: February 2026
• Publisher: Independently Published
• Length: 276 Pages
• Weight: 0.71 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.6" x 5.5" x 8.5"