Rory Madsen

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He thought the case was his.It was never his.FBI Special Agent Logan Matheson's wife was murdered on December 23rd, 2013. He was relocated. Isolated. Quietly removed from the investigation into his own wife's death by the same institution he had served for eighteen years.In Canon City, Colorado, he starts writing. He starts dreaming. And the dreams are not his. The Shadow for Hire has been operational for years — forty-three commissions, no investigations, a clientele drawn from the corridors of federal power. No one has come close to finding him.But he has been watching Logan Matheson since October 1998. Since a Chicago alley. Since twenty minutes that the official record never captured and that neither man has ever stopped thinking about. The documentation is ready. The house faces the mountains. The bourbon has been tampered with.Some cases find you. This one was waiting.

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The section chief is convicted.The case is closed.Logan Matheson is in Denver, running again. Then a letter arrives. Three intermediaries. No return address. Handwriting he doesn't recognize.The case was never closed. It was never even the right case.What Matheson dismantled was the visible layer. Beneath it, a second network has been operational for years — routed through federal institutions, insulated by the kind of men who understood that the surest protection was a position of oversight. Forty-six additional commissions. Nineteen clients. An offshore architecture built to survive exactly the kind of investigation that just concluded.The man who sent the letter has been building the documentation for five years. He knows where everything is. He knows what it will take to close it.He also knows that Matheson will go back in. He always knew.As You Are Awake is the second book in The Matheson Chronicles.Some cases don't end. They just change shape.

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The second network is dismantled.The clients are named.Logan Matheson is fifty years old.
The work is different now. Less pursuit, more foundation — the quiet architecture of someone building cases that will outlast him, handing off investigations he would once have run himself, learning what it means to stay out of the way.There is one thing he has not handed off.Twenty years ago, in a Chicago alley in October 1998, a man crouched down beside a boy who had nowhere to go and gave without asking anything in return. That man became a federal investigator. That boy became something else entirely. Both of them have been carrying the weight of twenty minutes ever since.
There is a letter that has not been written. There is a drive east through the November dark. There is a visiting room in the hills of West Virginia where the mind does not stop and the account is, finally, close to settled.Until Your Final Breath is the concluding book in The Matheson Chronicles.Some things take twenty years to say. Some things are worth the wait.