THEY CALLED IT AN ACCIDENT. RAY PRUITT KNOWS BETTER. Former federal mine-safety investigator Ray Pruitt built his career on one belief: every serious incident leaves a sequence, and every sequence tells the truth—if someone is willing to follow it far enough. Then a worker died. Ray found missing safeguards, altered records, and evidence that the official explanation was wrong. His refusal to let the case close cost him his career. Now he works for the people corporations would rather forget. When a catastrophic explosion at Calloway Point kills three workers, the company moves quickly to contain the damage. The cause is declared unforeseeable equipment failure. The reports are clean. The corrective actions are already underway. But the timeline is wrong. A shutdown system had been bypassed. Warning signs had been documented. Electronic records have been altered. And before the dead have even been buried, someone is already deciding who will take the blame. Ray begins digging. What he uncovers leads far beyond one plant—to a hidden system of consultants, insurers, executives, and regulators capable of rewriting industrial disasters after they happen. With brilliant digital investigator Nia Vale recovering records others believed were permanently erased, Ray follows the evidence through abandoned facilities, falsified control histories, compromised investigations, and the case that destroyed his own career. But the deeper they go, the more disturbing the pattern becomes. The system isn't simply hiding accidents. It may be deciding what the official cause will be before anyone dies. ROOT CAUSE is a tense contemporary conspiracy thriller about industrial disasters, corporate power, manipulated evidence, and one investigator who refuses to accept a convenient explanation. Book One of THE ROOT CAUSE FILES.
