In Ashburn, the city doesn’t sleep—it twitches.
It grinds men down, chews through their souls, and spits out what’s left with a crooked grin.
Once, Robert Tucker wore a badge polished bright with idealism. Fresh out of the academy, he thought he could make a difference in a city built on vice, velvet lies, and rain-slick corruption. But a decade under the neon hum and coal-smoke skies of Ashburn turned that badge into a paperweight and that hope into bourbon.
Now he’s a private eye working out of a one-room office with a bottle in his drawer, a secretary who files extortion notices under “routine,” and a conscience held together by the rules his dead partner left behind—Fallon’s Rules. Twelve of them. Not one guarantees survival.
The syndicate boss Vincent Crowe owns the city’s shadows, but when Crowe gets in over his head the rot only deepens. Tucker’s caught between crooked judges, dying reporters, and a government experiment that makes the fog itself lethal. Everyone’s selling something in Ashburn—even redemption.
In a city that eats its own, Tucker knows you don’t fight to win. You fight because you’re still breathing.
Rule 13 — a hardboiled descent through smoke, blood, and brass where justice is a rumor, truth burns like cheap whiskey, and the only clean thing left in Ashburn is the rain that never stops falling.