THE SHAPE OF A THING - A Marcus Cole Novel

By Victor A-Joseph

Anthony Reyes has been in Salinas Valley State Prison for nine years for a murder he did not commit. The case against him was clean: a forged insurance document naming him as the beneficiary, a workplace accident that looked like an accident, and a jailhouse witness who said Reyes confessed. The man who built it had done it before.

Twenty-four years earlier, a freight company founder named Emmanuel Adeyemi was found dead in his home in Fresno. The ruling was suicide. His daughter Grace filed a complaint. No one listened.

The man who filed the welfare check that day was Martin Okafor - the same man who had spent five years earning Emmanuel Adeyemi's complete trust by making himself indispensable to the one thing the old man loved above everything else: his daughter.

When a letter from Salinas Valley lands on Marcus Cole's desk, he gives it the only thing it needs - someone willing to read it all the way to the end. His daughter Zoe finds the financial thread that connects two frauds separated by ten years and a company name. Grace Adeyemi has been keeping her father's journals for twenty-four years, waiting for someone to come to her door.

The evidence was always there. So was the pattern. So was the man who built it.

Careful people leave records.
So do careful killers.

THE SHAPE OF A THING is Book Four of the Marcus Cole series - legal thrillers set in Los Angeles and the Central Valley, built around wrongful conviction, the cost of patience, and the people who carry things long enough to matter.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: B0GVB4HKTV
• ISBN13: 9798253840337
• Release Date: March 2026
• Publisher: Independently Published
• Length: 230 Pages
• Weight: 0.69 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.5" x 6.0" x 9.0"