LATERAL

A Detective Dean Mercer Thriller

By: William Ferrier Jr.

Narrated by: Virtual Voice

Dean Mercer was the kind of detective prosecutors asked for by name.

At the Woodland Police Department, his cases were clean, his testimony held, and his reputation for excellence reached from courtroom to command. So when the LAPD recruits him into an elite lateral detective role handling the city's most sensitive investigations, it feels like the reward he's earned.

Bigger cases. More money. More prestige. The job of a lifetime.

Then a woman vanishes from one of LA's most powerful political families. A witness dies under convenient circumstances. A report changes after Dean signs it. And a case he buried twelve years ago in a small Northern California town resurfaces in the middle of his new investigation — connecting a dead courier, a dead civic attorney, and a missing filmmaker to the most dangerous people in Los Angeles.

What Dean uncovers is not ordinary corruption.

It is a hidden unit inside the LAPD built to manage dangerous truths for the powerful — suppressing evidence, burying murders, and destroying anyone who gets too close. And they didn't recruit Dean for his talent. They recruited him because his past is the one loose thread that can unravel everything they've built.

Now the system that brought him inside is closing around him. His cases are being rewritten. His reputation is being weaponized. His 90-day probation review is ticking down. And the only way out is to expose a conspiracy that reaches from the LAPD to City Hall to the richest developers in California — before they bury him with it.

To survive, Dean will have to break every rule that made him the detective everyone trusted. Including his own.

LATERAL is a propulsive detective thriller about ambition, betrayal, and the machinery of institutional power — for readers of Michael Connelly, Don Winslow, and Dennis Lehane.