Hidden Assets

Margot Sterling spent thirty years at the U.S. Treasury tracking the money. She knows exactly what a shell company looks like, what a fraudulent invoice smells like, and what it means when a dead woman's name appears in a vendor payment reversal the morning after she dies.

She also knows she's supposed to be retired.

It's June at Pelican Point Estates, the luxury retirement community on Sarasota's waterfront where Margot has spent the past year learning, slowly and with considerable resistance, how to stop working. The snowbirds have gone north. The Promenade is hers in the early mornings. The recipe book her late husband left on the kitchen counter is exactly where she has decided not to open it. Things are quiet.

Then the community director hands her a manila folder. Four years of reserve-fund records. Three flagged line items. Probably nothing.

Margot opens the folder on a Tuesday afternoon, and by midnight she has found five shell companies, one registered agent, and a dead resident named Eleanor Price who died in a fall in March - one day before her name appeared in a payment reversal that no legitimate vendor would ever have reason to make.

What begins as a financial anomaly becomes something else entirely: a fraudulent investment club operating inside Pelican Point for five years, draining the community's reserve fund through a network of phantom LLCs while its members watched their retirement savings grow on fabricated statements. And when a second resident tells someone at the club's monthly dinner that he wants to get out - the only other member who ever asked questions died in March - Margot understands that she is no longer working a fraud case.

She is working against a clock.

Hidden Assets is the second novel in The Pelican Point Mysteries, featuring retired Treasury forensic accountant Margot Sterling - a widow, a realist, and the last person in Sarasota anyone should have handed a suspicious folder. With the dry precision of a federal investigator, the warmth of a woman finally learning where she lives, and a slow-burn partnership with retired Tampa homicide detective Hank Ortiz that neither of them has fully named, Margot follows the money to a conclusion that will cost the community more than money.

For readers of Richard Osman's Thursday Murder Club, Deanna Raybourn's Killers of a Certain Age, and anyone who has ever suspected that the most dangerous person in the room is the one nobody thought to watch.