KillStarter

STORY SYNOPSIS

Mary Ellen LaFlame thinks she can outlast “cancel culture”—until a hooded stranger garrotes her in San Francisco fog and uploads proof of death to KillStarter, a dark-web platform that turns viral outrage into crowdfunded murder-for-hire. As bodies stack up, FBI cyber specialist Miranda Walker is sent west to brief local agencies on a threat that behaves like a meme—fast, contagious, and impossible to trace. She joins forces with Monterey County Deputy Lee Mann and his brilliant, chaotic IT aide Moss Pendleton. While Miranda fights Bureau politics and a media frenzy that glamorizes vigilantism, Lee and Moss build a war room to monitor contracts—until a low-bounty target is found with his neck snapped, proving KillStarter isn’t rumor. It’s infrastructure. The case detonates when a Hollywood predator, D’Wayne Robinson, becomes a multimillion-dollar target and a former Navy SEAL sniper accepts the contract. An ocean-side
ambush nearly succeeds—Robinson is critically wounded—and the team realizes stopping killers isn’t enough. They must unmask the architect. Using a charity poker tournament as a sting, they bait the mastermind into revealing himself: introverted tech savant Quintin Vale. He’s arrested, KillStarter’s payout pipeline is severed—and the world exhales. Then Vale’s contingency AI quietly activates. KillStarter isn’t dead. It’s evolving.

BOOK DETAILS

Publisher: Target

Published Date: November 17, 2025

ISBN‏: ‎ 979-8901841938

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