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The Second Family
Paperback
Series: Ryder Talon Stone, Pi, Book 14
Publisher: Independently Published
Published: Sep 18 2026
Pages: 278
Weight: 0.83
Height: 0.63 Width: 6.00 Depth: 9.00
Language: English
When Allison Harper hires private investigator Ryder Talon Stone, she believes she already knows what he is going to find.
Her husband, Eric, is disappearing for stretches of time he cannot adequately explain. His routines have changed. His answers have become careful. And there are enough small inconsistencies for Allison to suspect the oldest explanation in the book.
Another woman.
Ryder has worked enough domestic investigations to know how these cases usually unfold. Surveillance. Documentation. A photograph that confirms what the client already fears.
But the photograph he brings back does something worse.
It shows Eric with a young girl named Ellie.
And beneath the image are three words that make Allison's marriage suddenly impossible to understand:
DAD + ELLIE.
The trail leads Ryder from Sarasota County to North Port and into the life of Rebecca Lawson, a woman who knows Eric by another name: Mike Hart.
Rebecca does not believe she has been part of an affair. She believes Eric belongs in her family. Ellie believes it too.
What begins as an investigation into infidelity becomes something far more complicated-a second household built beside the first, sustained not by a single lie but by years of carefully separated truths.
Yet Eric's deception is only the beginning.
Before him, Rebecca shared her life with Michael Hart, Ellie's father, whose death eleven years earlier was ruled the result of a single-vehicle accident. The official evidence has never demanded another conclusion. But once Ryder begins pulling at the history surrounding Michael's death, anonymous messages arrive suggesting there is more to the story.
A dashcam recording.
Old timelines.
Questions nobody had thought to ask.
And a man living under a dead man's name.
Ryder understands the danger of coincidence. He also understands the greater danger of deciding what a coincidence means before the evidence supports it. Eric has lied about nearly everything that matters, but a liar is not automatically a killer. The deeper Ryder investigates, the more he must separate what can be proved from what betrayal makes everyone willing to believe.
For Allison, the investigation becomes less about discovering where her husband goes and more about confronting the possibility that an entire portion of his life existed beyond her knowledge.
For Rebecca, the truth threatens a family she never realized had been built on borrowed ground.
For Ellie, the adults around her must find a way to explain that love can be genuine even when the circumstances surrounding it are not.
And for Ryder, the case becomes an uncomfortable study in the difference between a false identity and a false life.
Then Hurricane Ian becomes part of the story in a way no investigative report can reduce to a simple conclusion.
Rebecca remembers the man who stayed when the water came.
Allison remembers the husband who left.
Both memories are true.
That may be the hardest part.
As Ryder follows the evidence surrounding Michael's death and the anonymous messages pointing toward Eric, he is forced to confront a question investigators encounter more often than anyone wants to admit:
What happens when a person can be guilty of an enormous betrayal-and still be innocent of the thing everyone most wants to blame him for?
The Second Family - Book Fourteen is a psychologically charged Ryder Talon Stone investigative thriller about marriage, identity, grief, parenthood, divided loyalties, and the devastating consequences of discovering that the person you trusted did not have one secret life.
He had two families.
And neither one knew the other existed.
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