The Meridian Network

Eleanor Whitmore plays piano every morning.

Or she did, until a care management company moved in and rearranged her life. Now she plays in the evenings, when the staff have finished for the day. She is allowed one phone call a week, supervised. Her retirement savings are being managed by a firm she never chose. She has been counting the days since the hearing she was never told about.

She is not confused. She is not incapacitated. She is seventy-nine years old, precise as a metronome, and completely trapped.

Her daughter writes to the only address she can find: the Sunset Village Community Library, Librarian.

Margaret Ellis has seen this before. What she hasn't seen is what arrives the same morning: a letter from Dr. Caroline Voss, a federal archivist in Washington D.C., who has spent four years building the Meridian Network - a national instrument for finding the patterns that no single jurisdiction can see. She has been studying Margaret's archive. She thinks it's the proof of concept she has been looking for.

Because Eleanor's case isn't a case. It's a node in a network - one of eighteen, across three states, operated by a Delaware shell company that has been running for eight years without anyone connecting the dots.

Someone needs to connect them.

The Meridian Network is the most ambitious investigation in the Sunset Village series - and the one that finally answers the question Margaret has been building toward for three years: what is the archive, really, and what was it always going to become?