Sloane Kessler kommt nach Kopenhagen, um die Voss Group zu prüfen. Sie hat nicht damit gerechnet, selbst zum Prüfobjekt zu werden. Anders, Tobias und Emrik Voss schützen seit einem Jahrzehnt das Imperium ihres Vaters vor genau dem Raubtier, das Sloane hereingelegt hat. Innerhalb einer Woche wohnt sie in ihrem Penthouse, schläft neben ihren Akten und weigert sich, sich zwischen drei Männern zu entscheiden, die sie nicht zur Wahl zwingen wollen. Als der Maulwurf in der Familie auffliegt, tun die Brüder das Einzige, womit niemand gerechnet hat: Sie verbrennen den Ruf des Unternehmens, um sie atmen zu lassen. Eine Milliardärs-Boss-Romanze mit einer Prüfung, die man nicht ablehnen kann, drei Männern, die alles teilen, und einem Ende, das vier Menschen unterschrieben haben.

Sloane Kessler came to Copenhagen to audit the Voss Group. She didn't expect to become the audit. Anders, Tobias, and Emrik Voss have spent a decade protecting their father's empire from the same predator that framed Sloane. Within a week, she's living in their penthouse, sleeping beside their files, and refusing to choose between three men who refuse to make her. When the mole inside the family surfaces, the brothers do the one thing no one saw coming: they burn the company's reputation to keep her breathing. A billionaire boss why-choose romance with an audit you can't refuse, three men who share everything, and an ending four people signed.

Sixty-five feet down off Raven's Point, Nora Parrish's dive light finds a wreck that is the wrong wreck. She has been hunting the Cormorant, a steel-hulled freighter that went down in a November squall in 1947 with a hold of silver ingots and a crew of seven. What her beam settles on instead is sixty feet of wooden fishing vessel, its pilothouse canted at a thirty-degree list, its planking bearded with anemones. In what is left of the captain's chair there is a skeleton. The rib cage has collapsed and the skull has rolled against the bulkhead, but the right arm is still articulated, and the hand points at a brass strongbox wedged under a fallen chart table. Then the current surges. And up on the surface, somebody has already cut her line. She comes up to a boat that will not run and a propeller that has been unbolted off the shaft. Declan O'Rourke finds her drifting, hauls her aboard, and gets accused of it for his trouble, because the cut line carries a splice his father taught half the harbour. His father has been dead three years. Nora's own father drew the Cormorant's coordinates on a napkin the night before the dive that killed him. Gus Hammett was his buddy that day. Gus came back. Her sister Jessie has been on the transplant list for fourteen months with lungs at thirty percent function, which is the entire reason Nora is in this water. The burner phone she brought up off the wreck lights up with a single message from a blocked number: *Find it or else.* A half-legible name in a waterlogged ledger turns out to be Silas Corbin, who owns half the waterfront property in Raven's Point and wears a gold pinky ring shaped like an anchor. What Nora and Declan strike is a fifty-fifty split, agreed between two people with every reason to distrust each other, over a wreck that has already killed one diver and that a developer is prepared to chase them across open water for. A closed-door small-town romantic suspense of commercial diving, harbour debts and a salvage nobody intends to let them keep.

A woman is dragged up the steps of a house she was turned away from at sixteen, and the man who owns it has no idea yet that keeping her is going to cost him everything he inherited. *Get her inside before someone calls the cops.* Rosa Catalano does not see who says it. She is too busy keeping her footing on a rain-slicked driveway with a hand clamped around her bicep like a vice. Another man, thicker and shorter, breathing through his mouth, shoves her forward. Her knees buckle on the marble step and she tastes copper where she bit her cheek. The house looms above her, dark windows and wet stone. She saw it once from the street, years ago, when she was sixteen and stupid enough to think her father might want her at a family dinner. He did not. The guard on the gate told her to leave before he called the police himself. Different guard tonight. Different circumstances. The basement stairs are narrow and the light is dim. She counts twelve steps down, because counting stops her thinking about what comes next. The room at the bottom smells of bleach and old carpet and the sour tang of somebody else's fear. What follows: a key nobody wanted, a ghost at the table, a garden two people inherit rather than plant, a bomber's signature, an exchange neither family can afford, the price of silence, a wound that ties them together, and a dinner that never happens. *Don't make promises we can't keep yet. Just be here. Now.* He thinks about her in the car, in the garden, in the thirty seconds before every meeting he is supposed to be chairing. He thinks about her while a man is still missing and a leak is still feeding information to exactly the wrong people. He is not going to stop, and he has given up expecting to. Not next year. Not when it is over. Not ever.

A federal courthouse at rush hour is the safest building in the city and the worst possible place to be wearing a wire, because everyone in it is already looking for somebody. Rain on the marble steps, a wet hiss carrying diesel and damp wool. Val Moretti stands just inside the revolving doors with one hand at her collarbone, thumb finding the pack clipped inside her jacket. The earpiece sits cool and invisible in her right ear. Dead air. She counts to ten, listening for any crackle from the team she was told would be here, and hears nothing but her own pulse. A bailiff's voice echoes off the limestone, calling a docket number she does not need. She watches the elevator bank instead, tracking bodies through the lobby. Three men in off-the-rack suits by the west doors, briefcases in hand, not talking, carrying the bored expense of defence attorneys who bill by the hour and never look at a clock. Somewhere in the building, or still circling the block because they can, is the crew belonging to Dante Vitale. What follows: a ring that holds the shame, a feast that bleeds, flowers he should not have sent, an oath she cannot take twice, a locked door that opens, blood that will not wash out, lies fed to their own people, and a second ring that never fits anybody. Val has been building this case for two years and she has never once been asked whether she wanted it. She was assigned. She accepted. The distinction stopped mattering somewhere around the eighth month, and now she is standing in a lobby with a dead earpiece and nobody behind her. *He was your brother.* *He was a traitor.* *He was your brother.* A closet that smelled of mothballs. A child with her fingers over her own mouth. A wheelchair on a hardwood floor. Dead air in an earpiece. A bag of soup left unopened on a counter. A letter in a pocket that stays folded. One bed. Two names. No good version of this.

How many jobs can one person run inside somebody else's building before the arithmetic catches them, and what happens when the man who owns the building works it out first? The last time Gabriella Moretti wore a waitress uniform she was seventeen and stealing tips out of her father's coat pockets. This one fits better. White button-down, black slacks, a bow tie she knotted three times in the alley behind the club. The name tag says Carla, a small private joke, borrowed from the agent who tried to recruit her six months ago. She declined. She kept the burner number. The social club sits on a dead-end block, unmarked except for a wrought-iron sign in curling script. Nobody eats there. The kitchen has been closed for years, but the back room stays open every night until the last bottle is empty and the last deal is done. She pushes through the service entrance with a tray of empty glasses and her heart doing the thing it always does before a job, settling into a low steady hum beneath her ribs. The scar on her left palm itches. It always does. Fifteen feet away is an office, and in the third drawer of the desk in that office is the underside where the bug goes. Plant it. Walk out. Let somebody else handle the rest. She has done this a dozen times. What follows: a debt that never sleeps, the mercy of a broken man, a wolf at the door, a pendulum, the bullet nobody sees coming, and a cradle built for a mole. *He made a sound low in his throat and pulled her closer.* Vito De Luca will hand back the club, the block and the name. He will put his own cousin on the floor in front of witnesses and explain himself to nobody. The first person who tries to take her out of that building without her consent is going to discover exactly how little of his patience was ever real.

The intruder is small, dark-clothed, wearing a cap pulled low, and she does not raise her hands. She stands behind his desk breathing steady, measuring the distance between them. *You're Lachlan Maddox.* She tells him he will not shoot her, and she is right about why: the desk is glass, a bullet through her shatters it, and the noise brings the whole club down on him before he has a single answer. So he takes the cuffs off his belt and locks her to the radiator pipe under the window instead. Then he pulls her sleeve up to check for a wire, and finds a crescent moon inked on the inside of her wrist. He has seen that shape a hundred times. His father drew it in blue ink at the bottom of every letter he ever sent from prison, and never once explained it. Her name is Paige. Her mother, Elena Devlin, wrote to Declan Maddox every week for twelve years and never met him once. Declan was president of the Iron Serpents for seventeen years before somebody put a bullet in him, and Paige came to Redemption because her own father died in a car crash that was not a crash, and because the police did nothing about either. What she finds is not in the desk. It is behind a vent grate: an audio file, six minutes and forty-two seconds long. A chair scraping on concrete. A jukebox with a skip on track four. And a voice she had heard two hours earlier, easy and laughing, at the table where she ate dinner. *And the father?* *Already handled.* Kellan is Locke's vice president. He has been riding with the Blood Hounds the whole time, and he has been planning this since before Declan died. Locke has known that voice for fifteen years. That leaves a woman cuffed in a clubhouse who cannot prove what she knows without exposing herself, and a president who swore over his father's body that he would never again let another person close enough to matter. A dark motorcycle club romance set in a Colorado mountain town, with a captive who refuses to behave like one, a traitor wearing the same patch as the man he killed, and a recording that starts a war whichever way it gets played. The romance is closed-door.

Natalie Shaw counts seventeen ways this can go wrong before she even steps off the bus, and she is still missing one. The Hawke Security building rises thirty-four stories over Westport's financial district, black glass and steel ribs. The guard does not check a screen or ask for ID. He nods at the elevators. They were expecting her. Alexander Hawke does not sit down, and he does not offer her a chair. *I expected your sister.* *She's not well.* *That's why she owes me money.* Elena borrowed sixty thousand dollars from Rico Vargas to cover a gambling habit. Vargas sold the paper to Hawke at a discount. With the interest and the fees added before the transfer, the folder on the desk reads ninety-two thousand, four hundred dollars. Natalie offers the only thing she owns. She is a forensic accountant, and she will audit his books for nothing until the principal is cleared. At her billing rate it would take eighteen months. She is not billing, so she says twelve. He accepts, and then tells her what happens if she runs. A phone call. A fraud charge. A sister who goes to prison and stays there. They give her a windowless converted supply closet with a chair that lists to the left. His chief of staff warns her that the surveillance feed goes straight to Hawke's phone and that he watches it while he sleeps, then adds that the warning was not a kindness. And a number she does not recognise sends her three words: *You're in. Trust no one.* Nobody in the building knows why she is really there. Her father was a contract forensic accountant at Hawke Security. He was looking at certain accounts, he left her a voicemail she did not play for three months, and then he was dead. The transfer document that moved Elena's debt is signed by a man whose faded security badge Natalie has already palmed out of a desk drawer. The badge is years old. It still works. A dark contemporary romantic suspense in dual point of view, with a forensic audit used as a crowbar, a murdered accountant, a man who has been sitting on that murder file for three years, and an anonymous contact who only ever texts when it is too late to ask questions. The romance is closed-door.

The fax machine whirs to life at 11:47 PM and drags Evie Marchetti out of a spreadsheet haze. Three spreadsheets on the monitor, color-coded by account, cross-referenced by date, linked by a single thread she has spent six weeks pulling. Petrov Holdings. *A shell corporation layered inside a trust inside a non-profit. Clean on paper. Rotten underneath.* She has found the row that does it. A payment to a vendor that does not exist, routed through a bank in Cyprus. Ghost money, laundered and taxed and laundered again. She is going to send it twice, for insurance: the SEC tip line, then an FBI agent named Grace Chen. She stands up, and the floorboard outside her bedroom door creaks, and the handle turns. Not rattled. Turned. The man who comes through the splintered lock catches her aluminum bat one-handed and takes it off her without raising his heart rate. Then he shows her his phone. A live feed of her living room, shot from above the bookshelf. Her kitchen, from inside the vent above the stove. Her bedroom, from the ceiling light fixture she has never once looked inside. Installed that afternoon while she was at the coffee shop, by a building super who takes an extra thousand a month from Nikolai Petrov. *"I worked for Petrov. Seven years. I know the accounts better than he does."* Dmitri Volkov is not offering protection out of kindness. Three years ago he was two blocks away buying an anniversary gift when a parking garage went up, and he stood at the barrier tape watching his wife's car burn down to its frame, with a velvet box in one hand and a melted baby shoe in the other. He has been telling people he is fine ever since and has never believed it once. What he has come to tell Evie is that Petrov has started burning every trace, beginning with the people who hold copies. Her sister Mia is exposed. Petrov has men at her apartment already. After that it is a cabin, a chain, and a series of messages from a burner: the bounty doubled, two crews inbound from Seattle, a reporter called Vargas asking questions about Petrov's missing accountant. Evie's father is in prison and the file in her hands is the only thing that gets him out. Dmitri has about twelve hours to decide whether she is a liability or an asset, and the honest answer keeps changing. This is a mafia romantic suspense about forensic accounting as a blood sport, a man who does his grieving as bookkeeping, and a woman who will not hand over the only leverage she has. The heat is closed-door.

The wrench slips. Bodie catches it before it hits the concrete, wipes his palm on his jeans, and tosses it back into the open toolbox bolted to the clubhouse porch. Gunner leans against the railing with his arms crossed, watching the lot like he expects trouble to roll in any second. *You talk to Prez yet?* *About what?* *About the salvage. That '79 Shovelhead's been sitting in Stan's garage for three years. Stan's dead. His kid's been letting it rust.* The Reapers want it stripped for the fall run: three hundred miles through the Bitterroot Valley, a meet with the Montana chapters, a chance to show the club has not gone soft since Knox took the gavel. Stan's kid is asking five hundred for the bike. Stan's kid will not take five hundred for the bike. Sawyer Ashford runs the garage at the dead end of Mill Street now. She slides out from under a Ford on a creeper, grease across her cheekbone, and reads Bodie in about a second and a half. *You're blocking my light. And you're not a customer.* He gives her his name and his club. She tells him she already knows both, and why he is standing in her bay. He says the Reapers are not just a bunch of bikers. She agrees with him, smiling thin and cold. *You're right. You're worse.* He does not leave with the bike. He leaves with a wrench on the concrete six inches from his boot and glass all over his seat. What Bodie does not offer up is the thing everybody in the club already knows about him: his father informed on the Reapers, and Knox's father died because of it. *It's my name.* What Sawyer does not know yet is that Stan was not the whole story either. There is a letter waiting about a mother she never met, and a half-brother riding with the Devils' Hand, and that half-brother is the man who killed the father who raised her. And somebody inside the Reapers has been selling routes out for years, and the president has known for two months and has been trying to buy his way clear before the rest of the table finds out how bad he let it get. This is a dark motorcycle club romance set in Montana: a mechanic who will not sell her father's bike, a vice president carrying a sin he did not commit, and a club where the cheapest thing on the table turns out to be loyalty. The heat is closed door.

Rain slashes at the station's single-pane window. Declan O'Shea has his boots on the desk and a cold cup of coffee in his hand when dispatch calls in a noise complaint: a neighbour heard screaming at the lighthouse keeper's cottage at 6:45 this morning. Female voice. Young. It is a uniform's call. He takes it anyway, because the red-taped files on his desk have been staring at him since seven - a quarter of a million dollars of town money gone across three fiscal years, Mayor Croft's signature on every approval form, and a trail that goes cold at every interview. Jerry Maddox has kept that light for thirty-two years. His coat is still on the peg. His boots are lined up neat beneath it. A half-eaten piece of toast is going stiff on the counter, and the window screen above the sink has been pushed out from the inside, not cut. Under the cot, wedged against the floorboards, is a page of ledger paper in cramped, heavy-handed writing that is not the mayor's. When Declan comes out onto the stoop, there is a woman standing at the end of the pier in a tailored blazer in the rain, and he knows the shape of her before she turns. Lila Marchetti has not been in Port Blaine since her sister's funeral. She writes for a paper in Portland now. She has a thin white scar through her left eyebrow and an old refusal to accept what the coroner put on the form: that Cassie's death was a fall, that it was accidental, that the case was closed. *Rules didn't save my sister.* The neighbour who reported the screaming called Lila before she called the police, because the town already knows Lila is asking questions again. And what she and Declan piece together - a town planner who has disappeared, a stack of surveillance photographs a previous investigator took of boat meetings at the marina, an enforcer in a leather vest who was somewhere he should not have been - keeps folding two separate cases into the same one. Her mother has been holding a name back for three years. A small-town dark romance of municipal corruption, an unclosed grave and a cop who would rather have a warrant than a shortcut - closed-door, with a returning journalist, a detective who has known her since high school, and an ending that includes a proposal made in a hospital waiting room with carnations bought on sale.

A man crouches behind a dumpster in the rain, fifteen yards from a bakery's back door, holding a revolver on the two old men inside while they sign a peace treaty over a plate of lamb bones. His mother steps out of the shadows and tells him to lower it. *This one buys you time.* Nine hours before the wedding, the contract is read aloud again in the study. The Caruso family releases all claims on the Brooklyn docks and the Belmont Avenue territory. The Moretti family cedes the Red Hook warehouse district. The heads of the Fanucci, Lombardi and Rossi families witness it. And on page three: the Caruso family guarantees the safety and well-being of Luca Moretti, held as collateral, for the duration of the marriage contract. Any harm to him voids the treaty and triggers a blood ceremony against the offending party. Matteo Caruso is marrying Sofia Moretti to stop a war that has killed seventeen men in six months. He has done his research on her. She is twenty-four. She has spent the last six months teaching ballet to children in a studio her father owns in Brooklyn, and her father has been laundering money through that studio while she smiled for the cameras out front. Matteo knows she was not part of it. He doubles the watch on her wing anyway. *I think her father sent her here with a knife she hasn't pulled yet.* His brother Dante is the underboss, and Dante thinks the marriage is surrender. He says so in the study. He calls the bride a whore, pours two fingers of whiskey, throws the tumbler at the wall and watches it run down the wallpaper in slow streaks. Matteo tells him precisely what will happen to his rank if he says it again. And a note has already reached the estate, delivered by a street kid who was paid cash and has not been seen since. Somewhere in these walls, a traitor is breathing. Sofia arrives knowing exactly what she is: a signature with a pulse, sent to smile and be good and remember that her brother's life depends on her performance. As his consigliere puts it, *her father didn't send her here to make you happy. He sent her here to survive.* What nobody accounts for is Sofia declining the role. *I'm not going to run. I'm not going to hide. And I'm not going to let you push me away because you think you're protecting me.* A dark mafia romance about an arranged marriage with a hostage clause written into it, a house with an informer inside it, and a woman who refuses to be anybody's prize.

This latest edition of Case Critical applies decolonized, critical analysis to highlight what is often hidden from view for most Canadians: the personal trauma and communal devastation inflicted on Indigenous people by past and present colonialism and the ways in which neoliberal tax cuts, austerity, and privatization create more inequality, homelessness, and despair among both Indigenous and non-Indigenous people. Social service providers, the authors argue, should become social activists, working in solidarity with progressive grassroots social movements in order to de-legitimatize colonial and neoliberal policies. Looking for the PDF of Table 5.1: Social Work Skills in Social Services (2017)? Download it under "Extras".