Beyond My Pay Grade

ABOVE MY PAY GRADE

A legacy of silence. A valley of secrets. A debt that has finally come due.

On a warm October evening in a glass-walled Los Angeles art gallery, billionaire Franklin Marshall collapses and dies in front of two hundred elite witnesses. The cause: a rare, fast-acting toxin delivered through a single, brined oyster. Marshall, a man who built empires by controlling the supply, was weeks away from making a confession that would have dismantled the lives of the most powerful men in Washington—starting with Senator Theodore Whitmore.

Jamie Rodriguez, a sixteen-year-old high school journalist with a homemade press badge and a relentless drive for the truth, is the first on the scene. What she discovers is not just a murder, but a thirty-year cover-up of an environmental crime that has poisoned a community.

Joined by Sam Liu, whose mother has spent six years working inside Marshall's empire to document the truth, Jamie follows a paper trail that leads from the glittering heights of Bel Air to a fog-wrapped cabin in Humboldt County. There, they find the man who knows where the bodies are buried—and the memo that proves the contamination was no accident.

As the clock ticks down to a backroom political deal designed to bury the evidence forever, Jamie and Sam must decide how much they are willing to risk to give a voice to twelve hundred people who have been told for twenty years that their sickness was a coincidence.

In a world where justice is often considered above one's pay grade, two girls are about to prove that the truth has no price tag.