Rory Madsen

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The trial that ends it all begins in January.FBI Special Agent Logan Matheson has spent four years building the case against Gerald Voss — the federal administrator who turned the Bureau of Prisons into the operational backbone of a murder-for-hire network. Now, with the most important prosecution of his career finally underway, Matheson must watch from the gallery while AUSA Esperanza Navarro dismantles Voss's empire piece by piece in a Denver courtroom.But the case isn't finished. It was never finished. When a key witness takes the stand, a single name surfaces — a name not yet in the record, not yet within reach. The network has one more architect still in position. And Matheson, whose methods have always been the same — build from the inside out, let no single element bear the weight alone — has one more foundation to lay.Meanwhile, in the hills of West Virginia, Williams Hadow sits with a question he has been holding for twenty-three years. He wrote to Matheson in the fall. He is still waiting for the answer.Until Your Final Breath is the final chapter in The Matheson Chronicles — a trilogy about the cost of long work, the limits of what justice can do, and what a man becomes when he has spent a lifetime running toward smoke he could not pass. For readers who have followed Matheson from Canon City to Denver to the steps of every courthouse in between, this is where the accounting arrives.

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BOOK I

Every victim had a price carved into their forehead. His wife's said FREE.FBI Special Agent Logan Matheson spent three years hunting the killer Chicago called the Shadow — a contractor who takes commissions, executes them with surgical precision, and marks each body with the fee. Matheson was closer than anyone had ever been.Then, on the night before Christmas, the Shadow came to Benton Avenue.Four months later Matheson is living under a borrowed name in a small Colorado town at the mouth of the Royal Gorge, drinking one glass of bourbon a night and pouring a second he never touches. The Bureau calls it protective relocation. He knows what it is: the case has been taken away from him, and the only thing left is the part of it that lives in his head.Until a sycamore branch appears on his porch step. Until a stranger greets him on Main Street by the name he no longer uses. Until he wakes at 3:47 in the morning from a dream in which he is not watching the killer — he is the killer, feeling the weight of the hatchet in his hand — and learns the next day that a young woman died exactly the way he dreamed it.Someone is inside his house. Someone is inside his sleep. And every move being made in Canon City is designed to make the evidence point at one man: Logan Matheson.To survive, he will have to stop asking who the Shadow is and start asking the question the killer has wanted him to ask all along: why him?While You Were Asleep is the first book of the Matheson Chronicles, a psychological crime trilogy about a man who runs toward smoke, the killer who has been watching him for fifteen years, and the price of finally understanding what he was given.

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BOOK II

The Shadow is in a federal prison. He walked in on his own. And he has one more account to settle.Two years after the night he climbed out of a pine box in the Colorado dark, Logan Matheson has something that resembles a life. Denver. A morning run. A corkboard with nothing on it. The section chief who bought his wife's murder is serving his sentence. The man who carried it out is serving his. The case is closed.Then a letter arrives from the Federal Correctional Institution at Englewood, in a hand Matheson knows better than his own.The account is not settled.Inside the envelope is a Chicago transit token he mailed six weeks ago — and a name. A Regional Administrator in the Federal Bureau of Prisons who has spent five years running a second market for murder, routed through the prison system itself: wardens as clients, inmates and correctional officers as inventory, a corrupt Bureau analyst feeding it intelligence. The letter says where the records are. The letter says the prosecutor who rejected the Sharp Lake documentation isn't the last man with a reason to want the Shadow's cooperation stopped.And one line, near the end, that Matheson reads standing up: You were right about Jack.The killer who took everything from him has just handed him the case that will explain the one death he could never account for — the partner who walked into a Chicago parking garage on a Monday night in April 2014 and never walked out. To finish it, Matheson will have to do the thing he swore in Nashville he would never do again.Sit across a table from Williams Hadow. And trust him.As You Are Awake is the second book of the Matheson Chronicles — a psychological crime thriller about the architecture of murder, the cost of accuracy, and two men who cannot stop looking in each other's direction.