THE FIXER

Cassidy Rourke has spent twelve years recovering people that powerful families want found quietly. She reads rooms, reads people, and never asks questions she isn't paid to ask. She's good at this because she doesn't get attached — not to the cases, and not to the men inside them.

Then a family fixer named Devlin Gault calls through her referral network with a missing daughter and impeccable terms.

Before Cassidy can find twenty-two-year-old Mara Seldane and close the file, there's the specific quality of Gault's answers — technically true, complete in the ways that don't matter, and missing the things that do. A room in the Seldane estate that was cleaned too thoroughly, down to a daily medication that doesn't travel well with impulsive people. Evidence that Mara built a financial runway before she left. A staff member who says Mara came to the kitchen the evening before and said goodbye — just to her, specifically. The moment Cassidy realizes that Gault knew which cameras to avoid before she asked — and that "fifteen years in this house" is getting very load-bearing as an explanation.

She's spent her career trusting what she can read. He's the first person in twelve years she can't read cleanly — and she is too good at her job not to understand what that means.

Then she figures out why he hired her. And what the exit he built was never going to include.

Dark romantic suspense where the competent heroine runs toward the truth and the morally grey hero is the reason she finds it. The kind of book you stay up too late reading because you have to know if she gives him the chance to explain before it's too late.

WHY THIS WILL SELL

→ Kidnapping (Crime Fiction) sits in Hot Mainstream with ~775 estimated daily sales per top 20 title and approximately 565 average sales rank — active, proven demand with room to compete

→ Domestic Thriller is the single most-used category path in the MTS Top 100 — dual positioning captures both the kidnapping thriller audience and the loyal domestic suspense reader community

→ The morally grey hero with a hidden agenda is the highest-performing character archetype in romantic suspense — top MTS charting authors (White, Heard, Elliot) all built their heat around male-lead opacity; this premise delivers the archetype with a structural mystery layer underneath

→ Fair-play mystery architecture drives significantly higher reread and review rates — every clue is planted, the reveal rewards the attentive reader, and the built-in reread payoff generates organic word-of-mouth

→ Off-books recovery setting differentiates from procedural saturation — no badge, no warrant, no backup; readers fatigued by cop/detective leads actively search for this

→ Standalone in a world with series potential — 53% of MTS Top 100 titles are standalones generating 56% of list royalties; secondary characters are seeded for Books 2 and 3 without requiring them

TROPES: • Competence-Forward Heroine • Dangerous Ally with Hidden Agenda • Forced Proximity • Slow-Burn Trust • Morally Grey Hero • Secrets the Hero Keeps • The Sacrificial Move • He Built the Exit Before He Knew Her • Dual First-Person POV • She Figures It Out • The Plan Didn't Account for This • The Confrontation Scene • He Lets Her Go • The Full Account • HFN Ending

HEAT LEVEL: Open Door / High Spice — two intimacy scenes built into the architecture at the midpoint and Act 2B; explicit by default; fully adjustable via the included Dial the Heat™ guidance without breaking the outline; consent architecture clean at every setting

Perfect for fans of: Loreth Anne White, Mary Kubica, Michelle Heard, and Mary Burton

WHAT'S INSIDE THIS PACKAGE

⭐️ Story Premise — high-concept pitch, elevator pitch, and Market-Matched™ analysis with dual-category positioning (Kidnapping + Domestic Thriller), competitive analysis against three comp titles, and full suspense architecture additions: the hidden timeline (what actually happened in order), a seven-clue fair-play audit with misdirection map, and justice-question resolution checklist

⭐️ Complete Codex — full story bible with dual lead profiles at full depth, supporting cast of five, five settings with unique sensory anchors (Harwick House estate, the Grove Hotel operations base, Gault's South End apartment, the Ipswich recovery location, and the Alderton law offices), 28-day chapter-by-chapter timeline with hidden-events layer mapped by chapter, dual first-person voice system with four example passages each for Cassidy (precise, dry, processes emotion through professional observation) and Gault (architecturally complex, parallel professional/personal tracks), high-heat intimacy guidelines with Dial the Heat™ architecture, and full consistency checklist

⭐️ Chapter-by-Chapter Outline — 26 chapters + epilogue with emotional beats, word count targets, scene breakdowns, chapter hooks, and Dial the Heat™ flags at Chapters 12 and 16–17; hidden-events layer fragments mapped to their chapter positions; fair-play clues assigned by chapter number

⭐️ AI-Ready Chapter Prompts — 27 fully self-contained prompts (one per chapter + epilogue) with complete character context, scene specifics, emotional beat, tone direction, and ending hook embedded in every prompt; Dial the Heat™ branch instructions built into each flagged chapter so you can adjust heat without rewriting anything

⭐️ Marketing Copy — Amazon listing with categories and keywords, back cover copy, 50-word short description, Instagram main feed + Story slides, Facebook post, newsletter announcement with three subject lines, reader magnet concepts with landing page copy, reader targeting, series marketing with tagline and read-through CTA, and two Ideogram cover prompts with cover research snapshot from current MTS top 30 data

⭐️ Market-Matched™ Brief — market snapshot table across three categories, five data-backed "why this will sell" points, competitive positioning against two comp titles, seven-keyword strategy table with per-keyword rationale, and launch positioning covering categories, $4.99 pricing rationale, cover direction, and series release cadence

One buyer. One story. Exclusively yours.