The Inheritance Protocol (The Maddox Files)

Walter Hargrove built everything he owned from scratch — 1,800 acres of Ohio farmland, a regional manufacturing company worth $40 million, and a family he believed he understood. For fifteen years he told his youngest daughter, Ellie, that the company would be hers. Then he died and his will said otherwise.

Ellie hires Claire not to overturn the will but to look at the money — specifically, the final eighteen months of her father's finances, when his health declined faster than anyone could explain and his eldest son began visiting every Sunday with a bottle of good Scotch.

What Claire finds in the estate records is a shell company, an undocumented payment, and a dosing pattern in a hair sample that maps, week by week, against those Sunday visits.

The Inheritance Protocol is a case about what people do when they believe something is owed to them — and how long the evidence of that belief persists in the body.