A Due Diligence Novel · Book One
"In M&A, the most dangerous move is always the one nobody sees coming. And nobody saw her coming at all."
Maya Chen is a paralegal at Hartwell & Associates — invisible, efficient, brilliant. When she finds a single discrepancy in a 312-page acquisition filing at midnight, she pulls a thread that unravels a $143 million fraud.
What follows is a partnership — and something more — between the woman who was hiding in plain sight and the man whose empire she just saved.
M&A · Murder · Power · Romance
Maya Chen is a paralegal nobody sees. When she finds a $143 million fraud buried in a midnight document review, she saves the firm — and catches the attention of the man at the top. Their partnership becomes the most dangerous deal on Wall Street.
Available NowA $2.4 billion biotech acquisition. A whistleblower who dies the morning after he sends Maya his files. A drug trial with a suppressed safety signal. And a network built across five years and four companies that goes all the way to the top.
Coming SoonSomeone is trying to take Hartwell & Associates — legally, aggressively, and with enough votes to succeed. The person leading the proxy fight is a former client. One Maya saved. And she's using Maya's own name as a weapon.
ComingThe CEO signed the merger at noon. Resigned at three. Was dead by seven. The suicide note was typed. Maya has never met a CEO who typed his own notes. Four thousand jobs. One underfunded pension. And the first time Maya and Morgan are on opposite sides.
ComingNine billion dollars. A missing associate. A forged signature from someone who has been dead for eighteen months. And an accusation against Morgan that reaches back twenty years — one that only Maya can answer. She takes it to the Senate.
Coming"Maya Chen reads everything twice. So do I." — C.B.
The Due Diligence novels contain hidden messages.
Each book is also a puzzle.
Each puzzle unlocks something the book doesn't contain.
In Hostile Takeover, the first sentence of every chapter begins with a specific letter. Read those first letters, in order, across all 25 chapters. They spell a 25-letter message — split into three parts — that contains the author's name, the series name, and the next book's number.
The novel is divided into four Parts. Each Part has a subtitle. Take the first letter of the first word of each Part's subtitle. The four letters spell the title and fate of the central figure in Book Two.
The back of the book contains a contract schedule. Fourteen entries are accurate. Three have been altered. Find the three — their item numbers form your code. Enter it below.
| # | Contract Party | Annual Value | Expiry |
|---|
You found it. The three altered items were 02, 05, and 10. Their expiry dates ran upward — 2026, 2027, 2028 — while everything else plateaued at 2024–2026. Errors that run consistently in one direction are not errors. They are decisions. Maya knew this at midnight in a document room on the forty-fourth floor. Now so do you.
The next exhibit is waiting in Book Two.
Look for VT-117.
Count how many times the string "14-C" appears in the complete text of Hostile Takeover. That count is a number between 10 and 20. That number is a chapter number in Book Two. That chapter contains the key to Book Three's cipher. The series is a chain. Each lock opens the next.
Readers who solve all five books unlock a story that exists nowhere else — not in any edition of any book in the series. It has been there since Book One. Waiting.
Cara Bond writes fiction about power, precision, and the specific kind of intelligence that lives in close attention — to documents, to numbers, to the small inconsistencies that most people step over.
The Due Diligence series began with a simple question: what would it mean to be the most capable person in a room that didn't know it? What would it take — and what would it cost — to become impossible to ignore?
Maya Chen is not based on any one person. She is built from the quality of attention that has always seemed most extraordinary: the willingness to read everything twice, trust what you find, and keep copies of everything, just in case.
The cipher system embedded in each book is Cara Bond's version of Exhibit 14-C. Hidden in plain sight. Waiting for the reader who reads everything.
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