Synopsis

The Confessor is never wrong. He has built his whole life around being sure of it.

He chooses people who got away with it — never charged, never even suspected. The charity director who gutted his own foundation. The smiling influencer who built an empire on a lie.

He sits them down alone with a pen and a yellow legal pad, and waits as long as it takes for the truth in their own hand.

Then he balances the account.

The confessions are real. But on paper, nothing connects the victims — separate lives, separate crimes, no thread that should tie one death to the next.

Detective Logan Hollister has every reason to stay out of it. The money came a long time ago; the house is an hour down the coast, the kind of quiet other men spend their whole lives chasing. Logan can only tolerate it in small batches before he wants back in. He keeps the badge, works the cases that still mean something, and this is the one he can’t walk away from.

On the surface, he and the man he’s hunting are opposites. One has everything a life can hold. The other spent years making himself into no one at all.

But the bodies keep coming, and the difference between them keeps thinning — until Logan can’t always tell whether he’s hunting the man or recognizing him.

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Excerpt

Nobody called him The Confessor yet. That would come later, after the police found the pattern and the media found the name. For now, he was just a man standing near a window with the blinds drawn, laying down the next card.

“October 14. Check number 4471. $62,000 to Pacific Ridge Consulting for program evaluation and strategic planning.” He paused. “Pacific Ridge Consulting has never evaluated a program or planned a strategy in its life. Pacific Ridge Consulting is a shell company owned by Coastal Venture Holdings, LLC.” Another pause. “Coastal Venture Holdings has one member. You.”

David Kirsch didn’t say anything. His hands were flat on the desk, pressing down, as if the surface might hold him in place. He’d been behind that desk for forty minutes now — still wearing the white button-down from tonight’s donor dinner, the collar dark with sweat, his blue blazer draped over his chair. His silver hair, always camera-ready, had been raked through more than once. The practiced face — the warm eyes, the fundraiser smile — was all gone. What was underneath it looked older and smaller. Not much to look at, once you peeled the label off.

The desk lamp threw a circle of warm light across the office and caught the edge of a framed photograph: Kirsch shaking hands with the mayor at last year’s Veterans’ Day gala. Beyond the light, shadow. Plaques on the walls. Commendations. The kind of awards they give out at luncheons where everybody claps and nobody checks the math. Half the frames were crooked. The building was empty, the HVAC off, and the silence had a weight to it — the particular quiet of a place built for daytime noise that now had none.

“November 9. Another check. $41,000. This one to Meridian Group Advisors — community impact assessment.” The Confessor watched Kirsch’s face. “Meridian Group Advisors has never assessed anything. Same ownership chain. Same destination. You used different company names because you thought it would look less obvious than repeat payments to the same vendor.” He let that sit. “Your controller processes sixty invoices a month at a foundation that practically runs itself. She doesn’t check. She’s never had a reason to. You knew that when you hired her.”

Kirsch’s jaw tightened, but his eyes stayed on the desk.

The Confessor had been going through the file for twenty minutes, and the numbers filled the room like something physical. Specific dates. Specific amounts. Account numbers that Kirsch had probably never heard spoken aloud by another human being. The foundation had taken in just under $4 million in the last three fiscal years — donations, corporate sponsors, two federal grants — and roughly $600,000 of it had been rerouted through fabricated invoices from companies that didn’t exist. All owned by a holding company that existed only to catch the money and move it along. From there: a brokerage account, a money market, and a two-bedroom condo in Palm Springs deeded to Coastal Venture Holdings but with David Kirsch’s golf clubs in the closet and his reading glasses on the nightstand.

He knew all of it. Every dollar. Every date. Every lie the numbers told.

Kirsch had come to the office tonight on his own, the way he always did after donor events. The Confessor had been watching him long enough to know the pattern. The dinners ran until nine, sometimes nine-thirty. Then Kirsch would drive here — not home, here — and let himself into the empty building to do the work he couldn’t do with staff around. Building the next round of fake invoices. Updating the books for companies that didn’t exist. Reconciling the money as it moved from the foundation through the shells and into his own pocket. The careful architecture of his second life. Careful was generous — a halfway competent auditor would have found it in a month.

Tonight The Confessor had been inside the building for three hours before Kirsch arrived, sitting in the dark of the back hallway, listening to the building settle. The building had no security cameras. A frugal foundation serving homeless veterans didn’t spend donor money on surveillance systems, and the irony of that was not lost on him.

Excerpt from The Confessor by Noah Christopher. Copyright © 2026 by Noah Christopher. Used with permission.

About the Author

Noah Christopher is the author of The Confessor. He is at work on the next Logan Hollister novel.

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