No Forced Entry

Valerie Thompson breaks into buildings for a living. Legally. Banks, museums, private vaults — they pay her to defeat their security, then pay her again for the report explaining how she did it.

Fifteen years of those reports are written down in fifteen black notebooks, in a hand only she can read, on a low shelf in a spare room in Brooklyn. Every blind camera in New York. Every propped door.

Then a casino executive hires her firm, and likes her, and starts asking questions. Her father meets the man once and tells her to end it. He will not say why. He cannot — not without opening the room he has kept shut since 1998.

By the time she understands what she has been handed, the shelf is empty, the police are the one call she cannot make, and the only man who can help her has hands that can no longer feel a lock.