1st Case

Angela Hoot doesn't fit the FBI's mold — she's too unconventional, too brilliant, and freshly expelled from MIT's graduate program when the Bureau recruits her into cyber-forensics. Her first real case drops her into something far darker than a technical puzzle: a messaging app with embedded tracking software, and a pattern of young women turning up dead. The killer isn't just a criminal — they're a rival, matching Angela move for move in a digital chess match where losing means becoming the next victim.

Patterson and Tebbetts build this one around pace and escalation. The chapters are short and punchy, the kind that make "just one more" feel inevitable, but underneath the propulsive momentum is a genuinely sharp portrait of what it's like to be the smartest person in the room and still be outgunned. Angela is a fresh protagonist in the thriller genre — her edge isn't combat training or experience, it's code — and watching her learn to weaponize that skill under pressure gives the book a specific tension that feels different from the standard FBI procedural.