S.F. Stroud

Berkan Kayabek brings buildings down for a living, and he's careful about it — reading the stress in a wall the way other people read faces, easing a century of brick down into rubble without wasting a single crack. He's gentler with people than he ever lets on. It's buildings he loves taking apart.

He's hired to gut a condemned wing of Ozentay House, the city's most trusted name in art authentication — the place collectors call when they need to know whether a painting is telling the truth. On his first structural survey he finds a wall patched to look older than it is, and behind it, a room that isn't on any blueprint the House will admit to owning.

Then the House's chief conservator turns up dead in that room, in an "accident" that doesn't match how buildings actually fall.

Ozentay House has spent three generations selling certainty. Berkan is about to find out exactly what that certainty is built on — and what it's still quietly consuming to keep standing.