Treacherous Path

Autorentext

George Kerpi was born in Sakartvelo () -- the country the world calls Georgia -- and came to the United States driven by an unshakeable belief that stories are how human beings make sense of the world. He became a U.S. citizen, and America became the soil in which his writing took root.Treacherous Path is his debut novel -- a gripping crime narrative rooted in authenticity, drawn from real events that left questions no one fully answered. The core of this story is true: people who existed, choices that were made, a darkness that George Kerpi lived close enough to know exactly how it felt. What surrounds that truth is fiction -- the investigators, the details, the resolution. But the heart of it? That belonged to life first.Driven by a passion for exploring the moral complexities that lie between good and evil, Kerpi crafts immersive stories that challenge readers to look beneath the surface. He writes because he believes the line between good and evil is not a line at all -- it is a landscape, and most of us live somewhere in the middle of it without a map.

Klappentext

A severed life, a silent clue. A golden ring. A woman who vanished into the mountains. When a hunting party delivers a grim discovery to the Oak Ridge sheriff's office, Detective Captain Steven Harlan feels the old familiar pressure at the base of his skull, the one that tells him the night is far from over. The finger belongs to Dr. Natalie Brooks, a physician at an exclusive mountain resort who said her goodbyes, packed her car, and drove away three days earlier. No one had any reason to worry. Until now. Harlan and his partner, Aaron Chase, begin to pull at the threads of Natalie's carefully ordered life and find nothing is as it appears. A letter she never sent. An ex-husband who arrived at the resort the day she left. A severed finger wrapped with deliberate care and placed where it would be found. Someone composed a message in violence, and every detail was chosen. As the investigation deepens, the clean lines between passion and calculation, between grief and betrayal, begin to blur. Organized crime casts long shadows over quiet mountain roads, and the people closest to Natalie guard secrets that refuse to stay buried. In Treacherous Path, nothing is simply good or evil, and no one is merely what they seem. The only certainty is this: someone wants the truth found, but only the version of it they control. The question is whether Harlan and Chase can survive the one they actually uncover.