The Bradys and the Serpent Ring

She reads your future. Then she ends it.

A man broken by forces no court of law can name.

Victor Clair was once a man of wealth, family, and standing. Now he is hollow—haunted, trembling, and convinced he has hours left to live. He has confessed to murder. He has handed over the evidence. And he has begged the two sharpest detectives in America to lock him in a cage before something worse than death comes for him.

Old King Brady has heard desperate men before. But Victor Clair is not raving. He is *certain*. And when Brady holds the serpent ring—the elegant, poisoned instrument of a murdered man's end—certainty becomes contagion.

The woman at the center of it all is Lola Martine: fortune-teller, hypnotist, and something Brady's years of experience have not prepared him to name. She operates from a velvet-draped parlor on Fortieth Street, her clients the wealthiest in New York, her power over them absolute. Within minutes of the Bradys entering her sanctum, she strips them of their only evidence and leaves them gasping on the floor.

Now Brady fights a case with no documents, no witnesses willing to speak, and a suspect who commands the courtroom before she ever enters it. Behind Lola stands a shadowy English cousin with a motive buried in old family hatred—and ahead stands a man on borrowed time.

Can Brady break a woman who bends minds before he can prove she ends lives?