NORA VALE · BOOK THREE · COMING SOON

The Third Key

A Legal Thriller

By Jordan Drayton · Nora Vale

A locked storage unit in Flagstaff, two keys, and a client who doesn’t remember the night.

About the book

He's the one man she swore she'd never rescue. He's also the only client who has ever told her the truth: he doesn't know whether he killed her.

Twenty-two years ago Nora Vale packed her husband's things and drove his car to his brother's house. Now Frank Dorsey is sixty-one, two years sober, managing a self-storage yard on old Route 66 in Flagstaff, and charged with first-degree murder.

The victim is Kate Sallis, found locked inside unit B-27. That is the same unit where, weeks earlier, Frank found the belongings of Kate's sister Abby, an NAU student missing for eleven years. The State has his gate code, his text messages, his work jacket, and his DNA under her fingernails. Only two keys open that lock, and the State says both were in his hands. And the night Kate died, Frank was drunk for the first time in two years. He remembers a cup of coffee and nothing else.

He asked for Nora because "she's the only one who'll check."

The public defender doesn't want her. The detective thinks Frank killed both sisters. The victims' mother won't say a word to the defense. Nora is a retired homicide detective who works for the defense now, and she has never been less neutral about a case in her life. Before the State decides whether to seek the death penalty, she has to check every alibi and every key for a man she doesn't believe, and stand behind only what the record shows.

Unless there's a third key.

A twisting, emotionally charged legal thriller about blackouts, alibis and amends, from the author of THE OTHER SUSPECT and THE SECOND WITNESS.