Fine Print

Somebody read his letter. Nobody replied.

Inês Carvalho has spent eleven years as a senior claims adjuster in Porto, learning to read a loss the way others read a face. When a fire kills a couple in their granite house at the mouth of the Douro, it looks like one more file to close by the end of the month.

Then she opens the only thing the flames did not take: a fire-rated cabinet, a single folder, fourteen numbered tabs, built by a man who was waiting for an answer.

Following the paper from a basement mailroom to the ninth floor, Inês learns that nothing in a company is ever truly lost. It is only filed. And somebody in the building knows exactly where.

Fine Print is a slow-burn investigative thriller about insurance, paper trails and the quiet machinery of institutional silence. For readers who enjoy:

• A methodical investigator who trusts documents more than people
• Corporate cover-ups, arson and fraud unravelled one page at a time
• A vivid Portuguese setting, from the Douro to a corporate tower in Porto

Every policy has a clause someone hoped you would never read.