(Available January 2025)

In his Edgar Award nominated novel House Witness, Mike Lawson introduced us to Ella Fields, one of his most spectacular villains. In this brand new, digitally exclusive novella—which is about half the length of the DeMarco novels—Lawson's beloved Washington D.C. fixer, Joe DeMarco, finds himself face-to-face with Ella again.

Ella Fields was supposed to serve 14 long years, but thanks to a combination of good behavior and prison over-crowding, she's now free after just five years. Well, not quite free, thanks to parole.

If she behaved herself—if she was a model citizen—she would go from being a supervised parolee to a mostly unsupervised one and might eventually be able to live a normal life. A life that might not even be worth living, because she's completely broke and the only skills she has are the ones that had landed her in prison.

So, her future looks grim, and she doesn't know what she’ll do in the long term.

But she does know what she's going to do next.

She is going to kill the scumbag responsible ruining her life.

She is going to kill Joe DeMarco.