Caged

A night out. A shipping container. Young women who were never supposed to be found.
Casey Cort should be celebrating. She survived another collision with Cleveland’s powerful Brody family, kept her career intact, and even walked away with the kind of referrals that could finally establish her practice.
Then a date with federal prosecutor Miles Siegel is interrupted by a phone call.
Behind a Cleveland hotel, young Black women are discovered locked inside a shipping container. Neither Casey nor Miles knows how they got there, who put them there, or how far the operation reaches.
But Casey has already learned that power protects itself—and that the people who know how to manipulate the system are often the hardest to bring to justice.
As Miles searches for answers and Casey takes on the cases that are finally coming her way, the distance between Cleveland’s respectable institutions and its darkest crimes begins to disappear.
Because sometimes the most dangerous person in the room is the one no one knows to suspect.
Caged is Book 3 in the Casey Cort Legal Thriller series and features writing that earned Aime Austin a 2025 Mystery Writers of America Barbara Neely Scholarship.