Book One · Foundation arc · Launching first

Condemned Ground

Asheville, 1968. The city flattened eleven hundred buildings, called it urban renewal, and shipped six thousand people somewhere else. Sixty years later the survivors' grandchildren are still asking what happened to the deeds. The official answer is that the paperwork was lost in a courthouse renovation in the seventies.

The official answer is wrong.

Grant Prescott takes the case as a favor. He's looking at a folder of receipts, a forty-year-old letter from the city, and a signature on a deed that does not match the signature on the will. The county records are missing. Not stolen. Migrated. The migration vendor was a firm called Pinnacle. Pinnacle was acquired in 1994 by something called Meridian. Meridian does not have a website, a phone number, or a published address.

Meridian also, it turns out, has people. By the time Grant's tail picks him up on a Tuesday afternoon outside a Hot Springs gas station, he has stopped thinking of this as a favor.

"The map can lie. The satellite can lie. The records can be migrated. Ground tells the truth. That's the whole job."

Condemned Ground opens the Ground Truth series. Standalone case. Complete resolution. Nineteen more books seeded underneath. For readers of Clive Cussler, Steve Berry, Daniel Silva, Brad Meltzer, and Jack Carr.

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