Everything the Camera Saw

Thea Ballard has spent nineteen years telling juries what a video can and cannot prove. She is the expert the state calls when the footage is bad, the one who says "the camera can't" when everyone in the room wants her to say otherwise.

Then a neighbor's doorbell camera hands police nine minutes and forty seconds of continuous video, with sound, of Thea Ballard walking into a house on Sheldon Street in Providence and killing the man who lived there.

She was not there. She can prove she was not there. Nobody cares, because the recording is perfect. No seams, no artifacts, no tell. It is the cleanest file she has ever examined, and it is a lie, and she is the only person alive with the training to say exactly why.

To take it apart she needs a lab she no longer has access to, an evidence chain she is now barred from touching, and the help of Perry Vance, the defense expert who has spent twelve years dismantling her work in court and eating dinner with her afterward.

The closer she gets to how the file was built, the shorter the list of people who could have built it. And every name left on it belongs to someone who knows exactly how she thinks.

A forensic thriller about digital evidence, the people who read it for a living, and what happens when the machine that never lies finally learns how.