STATIC AFTER MIDNIGHT

During a brutal winter ice storm, Northbridge's emergency communications network suddenly goes dark, and lead telecom contractor Ross Keane is found dead inside a transmitter facility while trying to restore service.Audio producer Tess Merrick quickly realizes the outage may not have been caused by weather alone. Signal House's off-air monitoring recordings contain a control-tone sequence that points to a deliberate remote shutdown.The investigation uncovers plenty of people with reasons to hate Ross. A union technician resented his contracts. An activist group opposed the network expansion. A rival contractor wanted his county work. And Ross himself was hiding a damaging secret: he had caused earlier outages to collect emergency-response fees.But the fatal shutdown is different.As Tess follows work tickets, procurement records, technical logs, and recorded signals, she discovers that someone used the outage to erase evidence of a much larger corruption scheme.With Signal House's emergency certification suspended and Owen's career under public attack, Tess must decide whether protecting the station matters more than reporting the truth.And buried inside old redevelopment files is the strongest evidence yet that her missing sister Iris was never the thief Northbridge believed her to be.