One Question

By: Lavoie, Michael

One Question

Tagline: Twenty-four faces. One question at a time. Someone is eliminating them.

Forensic psychologist Elias Mercer has spent twenty-two years reading people. He walks out of a murder trial certain of everything, and finds a package on his porch.

Inside is a red game board with twenty-four photographs: twenty-three strangers, and Elias. A card reads LET'S PLAY. The back says I never lie.

An hour later, a woman is found dead in her car, her glasses folded neatly on her chest.

The rules arrive by text. One murder eliminates one face. After every death, Elias earns one yes-or-no question, and he'd better ask it fast. He may guess the Player's identity at any time, but a wrong guess has a penalty, and the person who pays it will be someone he loves.

The victims share nothing: a barber, a retired bursar, a toy-store clerk, a judge. They don't connect to each other, only to a single year, 2008, and to a nine-year-old boy who told every adult he met that something was happening at night. No one listened. One of them was Elias.

With his partner Detective Lena Ortiz at his side, and a seventeen-year-old daughter who sees what the experts don't, Elias must find the connection before the board runs out of faces. But the Player never lies, and every answer Elias receives is perfectly true.

One Question is a psychological thriller about the cost of certainty, and the dangerous habit of mistaking what a person looks like for who they are.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: B0HM4C4S3V
• ISBN13: 9798160544960
• Release Date: October 2026
• Publisher: Independently Published
• Length: 342 Pages
• Weight: 0.91 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 6.0" x 9.0"