ERRATA
Detective Megan Hawkes has lived with one cold case for twenty-six years. When a student is found in a drainage culvert arranged like a long-solved serial killer's scene, every detail reads like a dare: shoes placed at an exact distance, belongings composed, hair parted correctly where the original murderer got it wrong. Hawkes knows too well what that kind of precision requires — months of patient study, an audience with a particular skill — and she recognizes a signature she hoped never to see again. As bodies multiply and the staging becomes an argument rather than a copy, Hawkes must follow a dense trail of public records requests, academic papers, and intimate betrayals. The man at the center has built a theory to justify what he does; the crimes become both his experiment and his proof. Stalking him means confronting the memory she has carried since she was eighteen, and listening for a message that's been written specifically to be read by her. If she reads it wrong, more women will die. If she reads it right, she might lose everything that kept her living with the case at all. The question is simple and brutal: when an argument becomes a murderer's instruction, who gets to finish the sentence?
D.J. Brooks's ERRATA, the second novel featuring Knoxville Detectives Megan Hawkes and Luc Phan, is an intimate first-person, confessional procedural for readers who want psychological depth and moral stakes. Available — Fall 2026