Dead Freight

At 03:14, every camera on Carvath's northern freight corridor goes dark. Seventeen minutes later, forty-eight precision rifles are gone. And nobody is trying to sell them.

Private investigator Sonnie Martinez trusts paper maps, mechanical locks and an old revolver that nobody can switch off. When a frightened arms dealer hires her to find the shipment before its powerful buyer decides the theft was an inside job, she brings in the one partner she trusts: Rax Donovan, a quiet man rebuilt after a blast with a titanium arm and an augmented eye that records everything it sees.

By the next morning, the driver who sold the route is dead, and the city is ordering Sonnie off the case. That night, someone comes through her door in the dark to take everything she knows.

The rifles weren't stolen to be sold. They were stolen so they couldn't be used. In a city where the hardware in half the population's bodies may still answer to someone else, the people hunting them hold the keys to far more than one locked door.

Seven days. One missing shipment. And a partnership built on everything Sonnie and Rax have never said out loud.

Dead Freight is the first Martinez & Donovan cyberpunk thriller: a hard-edged investigation, a city with no clean hardware, and a slow burn that takes its time.