STOLEN TWICE

Hannah Kerrigan has a 94% recovery rate. She's spent nine years at Carver & Locke tracking stolen art across three continents, reading provenance gaps like other people read weather, and building a reputation so airtight that collectors who've done something wrong get nervous when she walks in. She's very good at her job.

The 6% is one case. The same thief. The same painting. Six years of open file.

Then Vincent Sandoval walks into her office and sits down.

Before Hannah can decide whether to arrest him or hear him out — there's the way he delivers the case against Gordon Kessler in three flat sentences, clinical and documented and inconveniently coherent; planning sessions that run past midnight in a rented Brooklyn workspace where they're plotting the most technically precise heist either of them has ever attempted; a reconnaissance sweep of the Kessler estate where he reaches past her in the dark to point out a camera angle and neither of them moves away; the moment she realizes he's built her a contingency she didn't ask for because he read her the way she reads rooms; and the slow, specific problem of being the most professionally well-matched person he's ever encountered when you've spent six years on opposite sides of the same case file.

She's spent years deciding who people are early and defending that reading, because it's faster and she's rarely wrong — except she's been wrong about him, specifically, for six years, and updating the file costs more than she expected. He's spent a decade reading objects better than people, cataloguing what she does so precisely that he confused it with knowing her — and she keeps doing things he didn't predict. A sixty-day partnership to recover one painting is about to unravel both of them.

Slow-burn romantic heist for readers who want the tension to earn its payoff. The kind of book where you catch yourself rereading the planning scenes because that's where it starts, and you almost missed it.

WHY THIS WILL SELL

→ Romance > Romantic Suspense > Suspense sits at strong commercial performance with 294+ estimated daily sales per top 20 title — the romantic suspense category rewards exactly this kind of dual-competent lead pairing with a guaranteed HEA

→ Dual-category play with MTS > Thrillers > Crime gives legitimate crossover positioning in both the romance-primary and thriller-adjacent lanes simultaneously — two discovery paths, two reader types, one package

→ Heist sub-genre is active and underserved — confirmed dedicated category in MTS > Thrillers > Crime > Heist with real competitive titles but no saturation; a heist romance with a fair-play plot is nearly its own lane

→ Slow burn + enemies-to-lovers + forced proximity is the highest-social-share trope combination in current romantic suspense — three of BookTok's most-searched tropes, all structurally integrated (not cosmetic)

→ The six-year cat-and-mouse framing delivers instant tension from page one without backstory drag — readers are emotionally invested in a dynamic that's been building before the book opens

→ Fair-play heist architecture earns re-reads — every clue is planted and every payoff is earned, which drives the reviews and word-of-mouth that sustain a title past launch

TROPES: • Enemies to Lovers • Slow Burn • Forced Proximity • Cat and Mouse • Investigator and Thief • The One That Got Away (Mutual) • Unlikely Alliance • The Heist • Dual POV • Six Years in the Making • She Catches Him But Not the Way She Planned • He Studied Her File and Got It Wrong • The Plan Within the Plan • HEA Guaranteed

HEAT LEVEL: Open Door / High Ceiling — 4 intimacy scenes flagged across the novel with full Dial the Heat™ options; default drafts at R-rated; each flagged scene includes a dial-down option (PG-13) and a dial-up option (explicit); consent architecture is clean at every heat level; the epilogue is earned tenderness, heat-neutral

Perfect for fans of: Mary Burton, Kendra Elliot, Sandra Brown, and Julie Clark

WHAT'S INSIDE THIS PACKAGE

⭐️ Story Premise — high-concept pitch and Market-Matched™ market validation with dual-category positioning (romantic suspense primary + heist thriller secondary) and competitive analysis

⭐️ Complete Codex — full story bible with Hannah Kerrigan and Vincent Sandoval (alternating POV), supporting cast of 6 including the antagonist Gordon Kessler and series-ready crew members Dace Morrow and Linh Trưong, settings across Manhattan, Boston, and the Kessler estate on the Connecticut coast, dual hidden timeline with fair-play audit and clue ledger, dual close-third voice system with distinct verbal patterns for Hannah (dry, laterally observant, architectural) and Vincent (object-focused, compressed, inclined toward what things are made of), Dial the Heat™ intimacy guidance for all 4 flagged scenes, and series seeds for 2 future books

⭐️ Chapter-by-Chapter Outline — 30 chapters + epilogue (~76,500 words) with full scene beats, emotional arc, clues planted and how they're disguised, red herring tracking, concealment architecture, and chapter-ending hook

⭐️ AI-Ready Chapter Prompts — 31 fully self-contained writing prompts (fresh-chat ready — no prior context required) with tone, pacing, voice guidance, clue-planting instructions, heat-level dial options for all flagged scenes, and Solve Point chapter labeling

⭐️ Marketing Copy — Amazon listing with 2 KDP categories and 7 keywords, full hook-driven book description, back cover copy, ≤50-word short description, Instagram posts (3), Facebook posts (2), newsletter announcement with 3 subject line options, ARC outreach template, reader magnet concepts, reader targeting profile, comp title guidance, and Ideogram cover prompts (1:1 scene image + 2:3 market-matched cover, each with settings line)

⭐️ Market-Matched™ Brief — market snapshot, "why this will sell" data analysis, competitive positioning, 7-keyword strategy table with rationale, and launch positioning recommendations (categories, pricing, cover direction, series strategy)

One buyer. One story. Exclusively yours.