The Truth You Told

Nathaniel Conrad, the killer the press named the Alphabet Man for the codes he tattooed on his victims, is on death row and out of appeals. Then, with the execution date set, he says something no one expected: one of the murders attributed to him was committed by someone else.

FBI forensic linguist Raisa Susanto goes back to the coded letters the killer sent authorities, one for each victim, and finds that the language does not hold together the way it should. If Conrad is right, then a murderer has spent years walking free while another man took the blame, and the case that shaped both Raisa and FBI forensic psychologist Callum Kilkenny was never actually closed.

The Truth You Told is the second book in Brianna Labuskes's Raisa Susanto series, a dual-timeline procedural thriller in which the evidence is language itself.