Witness Protection for Suburban Psychopaths
Jo Buckley didn't ask to be someone's fake wife. She especially didn't ask to be relocated to a Florida cul-de-sac full of nosy neighbors, smart fridges reporting her mood swings to a federal data cluster, and a government-issued husband who alphabetizes his spice rack and once ran a podcast called Namaste, Finance.
But here she is. New name. New address. Plastic flamingos on the mailbox. One HOA violation away from losing what little cover she has left.
The program is called the Swap - a bureaucratic fever dream where witnesses get reassigned into fake marriages inside a prefab subdivision, because nothing screams nothing to see herelike matching throw pillows and a half-argued trip to HomeGoods. The algorithm didn't check for compatibility. It checked face shape and threat radius, then called it a success.
Jo's fake husband Tyler meditates, cries at content about dogs, and has a skincare routine longer than his criminal record. Her neighbor Tracy has rewritten the HOA bylaws in gel pen and shows signs of building a tactical command center out of a craft room. Next door, Chad - government-assigned to someone, don't ask who - is livestreaming the entire operation to six hundred thousand followers while vaping on a porch he legally does not own.
None of them were supposed to be heroes. They were supposed to disappear.
Then Tyler vanishes. The Bureau goes quiet in that specific way that means someone is drafting a cover story. The smart fridges start sending reports nobody requested. And Jo starts to figure out that the surveillance infrastructure running their neighborhood isn't just watching them - it's reshaping them, one behavioral correction at a time.
Witness Protection for Suburban Psychopaths is a sharp, funny, and surprisingly sincere novel about four strangers who were handed fake lives and accidentally built real ones - right up until the moment the people who programmed them decided to run a Phase Three.
The flamingo incident was just the beginning.
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