Failure to Protect: A Nadia Cole Thriller - The Horizon Cases Book 1

The apartment was clean. The mother was sober. The report was a lie. The system took her daughter anyway.

Chicago caseworker Nadia Cole knocks on four-year-old Alma Varela's door and finds two braids that match her mother's, a refrigerator gallery of crayon drawings, and a gray stuffed rabbit named Conejo with one torn ear. Nadia knows a home in trouble from a home being performed.
This one is just a family.

The anonymous report says neglect, but everything Nadia sees says the opposite. So she writes it up unfounded, twice.

Then a third report comes, and the system stops asking whether it's true.

Nadia can prove the call was false, down to the invented black eye. Still, her supervisor states the order: "The child goes first, and the truth comes second." The removal is set for morning, with a bed waiting in a stranger's house in Oak Park.

Nadia promises to stand back. But by morning, she must break that promise or keep it: block the door and lose her job while the removal goes ahead anyway, or watch another caseworker carry Alma down the stairs, her rabbit left on the rug where no one thinks to pick it up.

A gripping psychological thriller about false reports, a family torn apart by the system meant to protect it, and a caseworker who refuses to let go.

Failure to Protect is Book One of The Horizon Cases series.