OVERTURNED

Monica Treviño is the Bexar County DA's golden girl. Rigorous, disciplined, the kind of prosecutor who reads every page of discovery and remembers all of it. Eight years ago she won a life sentence against a man named Tomás Lujan, under the guidance of the mentor who built her career, and she never once doubted she'd done it right.

Then she finds a nineteen-minute gap in a chain-of-custody log, and the math is impossible.

Before she can figure out who to tell — there's the visit to her mentor's chambers where his explanation contains a detail she knows is wrong; a defense attorney named Clay Dutton who hands her forty-three appeals filings without a word and watches her read them; late nights in his office after hours with both sides of the same case laid out on the table for the first time, arguing about evidence interpretation because that's safer than saying what else is building; the specific moment he puts a cup of coffee on the desk in front of her without being asked and she does not look up from the file; and a drive to the Hill Country and back that ends in a gas station parking lot in Boerne, terrible coffee, and five minutes of silence that says everything the case hasn't let them say yet.

She's spent eight years telling herself the conviction was righteous because her mentor told her so — and the story she built her entire identity on was someone else's architecture. He's spent eight years as the man who lost that trial, filing appeals no one would hear, carrying a case that should already be closed, and carefully not thinking about what it means that the person who matters most in fixing this is the person who broke it.

A legal thriller with a San Antonio courthouse built entirely out of pressure and a slow-burn romance that earns every moment. The kind of book you read with your heart in your throat because you need to know if the man in that prison cell goes home.

WHY THIS WILL SELL

→ Thrillers > Legal Thrillers sits at 6.5 sales-to-comp (Hot Mainstream) with ~76 estimated daily sales per top-20 title — contained competition (~11,700 titles) with sustained reader demand and high KU page-read volume

→ Dual-category positioning with Thrillers > Conspiracies adds discoverability in a 102-daily-sales category legitimately served by the judicial corruption spine

→ Enemies-to-lovers cross-sells into two distinct audiences simultaneously — the legal thriller reader gets procedural texture at full depth; the romantic suspense reader gets the HEA

→ Wrongful conviction + prosecutor-as-protagonist is the category's highest-performing emotional hook — rare inversion of the standard defense-attorney setup; no comparable comp currently owns it

→ San Antonio / Bexar County setting is a genuine market differentiator — legal fiction defaults to New York or Los Angeles; a fully realized Texas courthouse world stands out at the thumbnail

→ The writ-hearing set piece delivers a reversal, not a verdict — rarer and more emotionally resonant than the trial climax most legal thrillers use; high social-share potential for readers who recommend it

TROPES: • Enemies to Lovers • Rivals Forced to Team Up • Corruption Conspiracy • Wrongful Conviction • Mentor Turned Villain • Redemption Arc • Career vs. Conscience • Courtroom Showdown • Forced Proximity (working in secret after hours) • Slow Burn • He Notices Before She Does • Coffee Without Being Asked • The Partner Who Shows Up Before You Call

HEAT LEVEL: Heat-Flexible / High Ceiling — all intimacy scenes are flagged for Dial the Heat™ adjustment; the package includes every heat level from closed door to explicit without breaking the outline; consent architecture is clean at every setting; no power imbalance between the leads

Perfect for fans of: Scott Turow, Alafair Burke, Lisa Gardner, and Michael Connelly

WHAT'S INSIDE THIS PACKAGE

⭐️ Story Premise — high-concept pitch, elevator pitch, and Market-Matched™ validation with dual-category positioning (Legal Thrillers + Conspiracies), three comp titles with differentiation statements, and full suspense architecture including the hidden timeline and a fair-play audit tracking every clue, its chapter, and its misdirection

⭐️ Complete Codex — full story bible with Monica and Clay at deep profile (four distinct voice-example passages each), supporting cast of seven including Tomás Lujan as a full character with eight years of monthly crossword visits built in, six fully detailed settings across San Antonio, Kenedy, Kerrville, and Austin, chapter-by-chapter timeline, dual first-person voice system with Monica's prosecutorial architecture metaphors and Clay's mechanic-and-music register, heat-flexible intimacy guidance with [HEAT GATE] markers, and series seeds for two future San Antonio legal books

⭐️ Chapter-by-Chapter Outline — 28 chapters + epilogue at full scene-by-scene depth with embedded clue-planting notes, hidden timeline markers, heat gate flags, and a hidden timeline reference table at the end

⭐️ AI-Ready Chapter Prompts — 29 self-contained, fresh-chat-ready prompts for every chapter and the epilogue, set to moderate heat with [HEAT GATE] flags throughout for Dial the Heat™ adjustment at any level

⭐️ Marketing Copy — Amazon listing with categories and keywords, back cover copy, 50-word description, Instagram and Facebook posts, newsletter announcement with three subject lines, four reader magnet concepts, reader targeting, comp authors, and two Ideogram cover prompts (Prompt A: courthouse-at-dusk with silhouetted female figure; Prompt B: extreme close-up of the chain-of-custody form with a circled timestamp)

⭐️ Market-Matched™ Brief — market snapshot table, six data-backed "why this will sell" points, three competitive positioning analyses, seven-keyword strategy with per-keyword rationale, and full launch positioning including pricing, KU recommendation, cover direction, and series strategy

One buyer. One story. Exclusively yours.