Load Bearing - Anthony Frazer

A construction site collapse kills four workers. The investigation calls it an accident.

It wasn't.

Bartholomew Aldridge - ex-MI6, now running a small corporate investigation firm in Boston - takes the case expecting fraud. He finds fraud. He also finds four dead construction workers, substandard concrete, falsified safety records, a network of front companies employing illegal labour, and a system of corruption so deeply entrenched that the police who investigated the deaths are part of it.

When the investigation threatens to expose the truth, the people behind the system respond - not with lawyers, but with the kind of warning that comes with knowledge of where you live. And when the warning is ignored, the response escalates to something that's designed to look like an accident on a construction site. The same kind of accident that killed four men in August.

With a residential tower approaching occupancy and the concrete in its walls failing to meet basic structural specifications, the investigation becomes a race - against the network, against the clock, and against the people who will kill to keep a building's secrets buried in its foundations.

Where the buildings are new, the corruption runs deep, and the truth is load bearing.

The third book in The Associates series of corporate thrillers. Can be read as a standalone.