The Golden Frame

A Sacramento Conspiracy Thriller

The fog doesn't hide the truth. It just makes the truth harder to prove.

Nolan Cross has spent his career preserving other people's secrets. As a senior archivist at the California State Archives in Sacramento, he catalogs the past with the same careful distance he keeps from everything else in his life. Then a federal judge presses a flash drive into his hand — and turns up murdered the next morning.

The drive contains fifteen years of buried evidence: thirty-seven Delta landowners stripped of their properties, fourteen people imprisoned for crimes they never committed, five people dead. All of it engineered by a state senator whose power reaches from the Capitol dome to the courtrooms that serve it.

Now Nolan's fingerprints are on the drive. His name is in the dead woman's calendar. And the same machinery that destroyed thirty-seven families is turning toward him.

Running through the tule fog of Old Sacramento — past the underground tunnels beneath the raised streets, across the Tower Bridge, through the shadow of the Capitol — Nolan must do the one thing his entire life has trained him to avoid: act before he has all the answers.

The Golden Frame is a literary conspiracy thriller set deep inside the geography and institutions of California's capital city — a novel about what systems preserve, what they erase, and what one man risks when he finally decides that truth is worth the cost of telling it.

"The river was an archive that could not be cataloged, only read."

Perfect for readers of John Grisham, Scott Turow, and Thomas Perry's Jane Whitefield series.