In the Inker's Shadow

About this book:

Maya Lin is the invisible architect behind *Chronos Prime*, the industry's bestselling title—inking Julian Vance's legendary name into glory while he collects the checks, the credit, and the Eisners. For three years, she’s transmuted his lazy blue scribbles into cinematic masterpieces, secretly weaving a subversive counter-narrative into the shadows and crosshatching that no editor, writer, or fan has ever detected. She’s fine with the anonymity. Until the morning Julian drops dead at his drawing table, leaving the climax of the year's biggest event comic half-finished, a furious editor demanding pages by dawn, and a widow begging for silence.

With twenty-four hours before the presses roll, Maya retreats to the master’s upstate studio to pull off the ultimate ghost job: penciling *and* inking the final six pages in a dead man’s style, smuggling her own story’s explosive conclusion past a publisher who only sees the name on the cover. But as she races the deadline in a barn haunted by four decades of secrets, she realizes the greatest threat isn't exposure—it's the realization that the only way to save the work is to finally sign it with her own hand.

*In the Inker's Shadow* is a razor-sharp literary thriller set in the high-pressure, low-respect trenches of commercial comics. It’s a love letter to the unsung craftspeople who build the cathedrals while the architects sign the cornerstones, and a gripping portrait of a woman deciding whether the masterpiece she built in the dark is worth stepping into the light to claim.