Ghost

By Brian E. Niskala

Memory doesn't lie. Detective Mara Voss helped prove that in a courtroom eighteen months ago - testimony that convicted a killer, and quietly became the legal standard this entire city now trusts without question.
Now that standard is about to destroy an innocent man.
Warren Castellan is serving a murder sentence built on his own verified memory: clean extraction, unbroken chain of custody, a confession his own mind insists is real. There's just one problem. Mara recognizes the flicker at the edges of the footage - the same tell she once chased through a black-market memory ring. Someone didn't take this memory from Castellan's mind.
They built it.
The technology shouldn't exist. The Weave records; it doesn't compose - that's supposed to be a hardware limit, not a policy one. But as Mara pulls the thread, she finds a supply chain of recruited victims, a buried corporate research project, and a woman patient enough to spend a decade perfecting the one crime the justice system has no idea how to detect.
Catching her only opens the real question: how many people are currently serving time for murders, assaults, and betrayals that never actually happened - and how far does the rot go?
With her partner Ilya risking everything inside the very company that may have built this technology, and her own history with borrowed memory colliding with a case that keeps getting more personal, Mara has to prove the truth can still matter - before the machine she helped build finishes rewriting it for good.
A propulsive sequel to Static, GHOST asks what happens when the tool built to prove what really happened becomes the perfect weapon for making sure no one ever finds out.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: B0HGLZM9Y1
• ISBN13: 9798194481873
• Release Date: August 2026
• Publisher: Independently Published
• Length: 128 Pages
• Weight: 0.40 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.3" x 6.0" x 9.0"