Fair Warning

The novel opens with a woman named Tina bringing a man home from a bar after a night of drinking. After they have sex, the man locks her in a chokehold and kills her, whispering that people call him "the Shrike."

Jack McEvoy is a veteran reporter at FairWarning, a small nonprofit consumer-watchdog news site in Studio City, California, run by founder and editor Myron Levin. One evening, two Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) Robbery-Homicide detectives, Mattson and Sakai, approach Jack at his apartment and reveal that Christina "Tina" Portrero has been murdered. Her neck was broken through atlanto-occipital dislocation (AOD), a violent twisting that amounts to internal decapitation, staged to look like a shower accident. Jack had a one-night stand with Tina about a year earlier. The detectives mention that Tina told a friend she was being digitally stalked by a man who seemed to know intimate details about her. Jack voluntarily provides a DNA sample, confident his innocence will be confirmed.

Jack begins investigating on his own, posting a query on causesofdeath.net, a forum for medical examiners, about AOD in homicides. He pitches the story to Myron, arguing it centers on cyberstalking and consumer privacy. When Mattson and Sakai arrive at FairWarning to demand Jack stop interfering, Myron defends his reporter's press freedoms and gives Jack a few days to pursue the story.

Jack interviews Tina's mother, Regina, who reveals that Tina submitted her DNA to GT23, a budget genetic-analytics company. Checking the forum, Jack finds three other women's deaths linked to AOD in different states. Through social media and phone calls to relatives, he confirms all three also submitted DNA to GT23.

Jack researches GT23 and discovers the genetic-analytics industry operates with virtually no government oversight; the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has authority to regulate it but has chosen not to. GT23 sells anonymized DNA data and biological samples to universities, biotech firms, and private labs, including one in Irvine, California, studying addiction and risky behaviors. Jack visits his ex-girlfriend Rachel Walling, a former Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) profiler now running a private investigations firm. Their relationship collapsed years earlier when Jack prioritized a story over their partnership, leading to Rachel's departure from the FBI. Rachel advises Jack to investigate who is studying the genetic connection to risky behavior, pointing him toward the Irvine lab.

Through a wrongful-termination lawsuit, Jack finds Jason Hwang, a former regulatory-affairs specialist at Woodland Bio, a GT23 subcontractor. Hwang reveals that a major buyer of GT23's DNA is Orange Nano, a private lab in Irvine run by William Orton, who studies a gene called DRD4, nicknamed "dirty four," associated with addiction and risky behaviors. Myron assigns reporter Emily Atwater, FairWarning's other staff reporter, to partner with Jack. Emily discovers that Orton left the University of California, Irvine after a student accused him of assault; the criminal case collapsed when a DNA comparison came back as no match. Mattson and Sakai then arrest Jack on a misdemeanor charge of obstructing their investigation, though his attorney gets the charge dismissed the next day.

Jack and Emily visit Orange Nano, but Orton arrives with his defense attorney, clearly prepared and hostile. When Jack confronts Orton about the allegations and DRD4, the meeting collapses and they are thrown out. Rachel reconnects with Jack, and they rekindle their relationship.

Emily obtains a list of labs that purchased DNA from Orange Nano and discovers one registered to Marshall Hammond, an LAPD DNA technician who purchased only female DNA. Jack also finds Hammond's name in old case documents: Hammond ran the DNA comparison that cleared Orton, connecting Orton's escape from prosecution to the current operation.

Hammond and his former college roommate Roger Vogel created Dirty4, a dark-web site selling profiles of women who carry the DRD4 gene. Hammond isolated DRD4 carriers from GT23 samples while Vogel, a skilled hacker, infiltrated GT23's database using a Trojan-horse virus to reverse the anonymization and link genetic data to real identities. They sold these profiles to paying customers, primarily from incel (involuntarily celibate) communities. One customer, using the alias "the Shrike," downloaded the profiles of all four dead women. When Hammond and Vogel discovered this pattern and sent the Shrike a warning, the Shrike tracked Hammond down and killed him, staging the death as a suicide.

Jack and Rachel find Hammond's body at his Glendale home and recover documents from his printer's memory revealing the full scope of the operation. Rachel takes the information to the FBI, where Assistant Special Agent in Charge (ASAC) Matt Metz assembles a task force. The investigation identifies additional victims, including Gwyneth Rice, a 29-year-old woman who survived the Shrike's attack but now lives with quadriplegia. At a rehabilitation center, Gwyneth confirms her attacker's method and the accuracy of a composite sketch.

The Shrike escalates his campaign to eliminate witnesses. He kills the wrong man at a shopping mall while trying to lure Vogel into a trap. Jack, Emily, and Rachel stake out Vogel's workplace at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center and confront him. Vogel denies responsibility, insisting the site was merely a moneymaking venture. Seconds later, as Vogel steps into a crosswalk, a black Tesla driven by the Shrike strikes and kills him.

FairWarning publishes the story, detailing the murders, the Dirty4 operation, GT23's role, and the absence of regulatory oversight. Over the following months, Jack and Emily write 32 follow-up stories. Their reporting leads to Orton's arrest for sexual assault after investigators confirm Hammond swapped Orton's DNA sample to create a false negative. Emily eventually moves to England out of fear, and Jack launches a true-crime podcast called Murder Beat.

The Shrike remains at large for over 100 days. A separate threat emerges when Robinson Felder, an incel admirer of the Shrike from Dayton, Ohio, stalks Rachel and is killed by FBI agents after pulling a gun. Jack accuses Rachel of conspiring with the FBI to use the reporters as bait, and the accusation permanently damages their relationship.

After a live recording of Murder Beat's final episode, the Shrike hides in the cargo compartment of Jack's Range Rover. On the freeway, Jack realizes someone is behind him and quietly alerts Rachel by phone. The Shrike emerges and confronts Jack. Jack deliberately accelerates and flips the SUV; the unbelted Shrike is thrown free and crushed beneath the rolling vehicle. He dies at the scene, his identity forever unknown: His fingerprints and DNA match no database in the world.

In the aftermath, Jack visits Rachel at her office with a proposal to use the podcast to investigate and solve cold cases together. She says she will think about it. As Jack walks to his car, his phone rings. Rachel is calling back.