The Helios Directive

When a storm-battered North Sea oil platform goes dark and its entire night crew turns up dead, Orion field director Derek Ryan is pulled onto the case and sent to find out why. What looks like an isolated massacre unravels into something far older: Helios, a shadow network that has been quietly eliminating inconvenient people for four decades — and one Derek suspects had a hand in the mysterious accident that killed his own brother six years earlier.

As the body count climbs across three continents, Derek's investigation collides with a vanished operative carrying a decades-old grudge of his own, and closes in on the woman who has spent a lifetime building an empire on other people's silence. With his mentor running the operation from Geneva and a team he isn't sure he can fully trust, Derek has to decide how far he's willing to go to bring down an architecture built to survive exactly this kind of scrutiny — before it decides he's the next name it needs erased.

The Helios Directive is the first novel in the Derek Ryan series: a fast-moving thriller about grief, institutional rot, and the cost of accountability.