The First Story

A Rachel Kim Prequel Short Story

Before Rachel Kim broke the story that exposed a pattern of administrative deaths. Before she followed seven missing women into the most dangerous investigation of her career. There was the first story.

On her first day at The Sentinel, investigative journalist Rachel Kim is handed a cold file nobody wanted — the accidental drowning of Claire Calloway, twenty-four, daughter of one of the city's most prominent families. The case was closed. The family accepted the verdict. A veteran reporter spent six weeks on it and found nothing.
Rachel finds something.

A figure in a photograph that shouldn't be there. A timeline that doesn't hold. A family that closed ranks not to hide a crime, but to protect one of their own from the weight of having been present and heard nothing. And a young woman who, in the days before her death, had found something at work she couldn't leave alone — something she never got to say out loud.

The First Story is a prequel novella introducing Rachel Kim — the investigative journalist at the center of T. Patrick Brown's thriller series. For readers new to the series, it's where Rachel begins. For readers of What Remains and No One Was Counting, it's where she was made.

Approximately 10,000 words.