Critics' Requiem - Michaela Riley

Arthur Penwright's ascent was meteoric. His debut novel, The Echoing Silence, secured him a prestigious three-book deal and a life of luxury in Boston. But the fall is even faster. Orchestrated by a shadowy figure known as The Silent Judge, a digital mob on the platform Badreads systematically dismantles Arthur's career, his relationship, and his sanity.

Retreating to the shadows, Arthur utilizes his background in cybersecurity to hunt those who destroyed him. He creates EchoArchive, a platform designed to unmask his trolls and destroy them in the offline world. But the revenge plot takes a lethal turn when his targets begin turning up dead, each victim left with a scorched, annotated copy of Arthur's novel.

As Boston Homicide Detective Stephen Mercer follows a trail of literary breadcrumbs, he suspects the obvious suspect is merely a red herring. Beneath the surface of a simple revenge killing lies a conspiracy involving stolen authorship and a secret that has been hidden since the manuscript's inception.