Sixteen people are dead. The world calls it an accident. One woman is paid to make sure it stays that way.

When a Crescent Petroleum corporate jet goes down on approach to San Cristobal, taking the company’s entire senior leadership with it, crisis-communications expert Margot MacDougal is on the first flight to Houston. Her brief is simple: steady the share price, manage the grieving families, and control the narrative before it controls the company.

But the narrative won’t stay where she puts it.

The deeper Margot digs into a corporation in freefall, the more the tragedy starts to look like a design — a camera that went dark for fourteen minutes, a name crossed off a passenger manifest, a string of earlier deaths nobody connected. Three executives are circling the empty CEO chair, and one of them is willing to kill for it. The trouble is, the evidence points a little too cleanly at the obvious suspect… and Margot has spent her whole career learning that the obvious story is the one somebody wants you to believe.

As the memorial flowers wilt and the boardroom knives come out, Margot realizes she hasn’t been hired to manage a crisis. She’s been hired to stand inside one — and the people who engineered it are watching her get closer.

A propulsive, twisting thriller about power, grief, and the dangerous space between the truth and the story we’re told. Perfect for readers who devoured the boardroom warfare of Succession and the domestic dread of Shari Lapena and Freida McFadden.

The Crescent Deception is Book One of the Crescent Trilogy. The sequel, The Crescent Conspiracy, arrives in 2027.