The Never Game

The first installment in the Colter Shaw series opens with a flash-forward in which Colter Shaw, a professional reward seeker, sprints toward a sinking fishing vessel in the Pacific Ocean. A kidnapped pregnant woman named Elizabeth Chabelle is trapped inside, and Shaw plunges into freezing water to save her. The narrative jumps back two days to trace how he arrived at this moment.

On Friday, June 7, Shaw is staying at an RV park in Oakland, California. He recently stole documents from UC Berkeley's archives, papers assembled by his late father, Ashton Shaw, a survivalist and former professor who died 15 years earlier in a fall from Echo Ridge, a cliff on the family's remote Compound. The death was ruled an accident, but Shaw suspects murder. A colleague's letter warned Ashton that someone named Braxton, connected to a rival faction pursuing Ashton, was alive and headed his way. Shaw hopes the documents will reveal the truth.

His investigation is interrupted when his business associates, Teddy and Velma Bruin, alert him to a new case. Frank Mulliner, a financially struggling father in Mountain View, has posted a $10,000 reward for his missing 19-year-old daughter, Sophie Mulliner. Mulliner insists Sophie would never leave voluntarily because she would never abandon her beloved poodle, Luka.

Shaw traces Sophie to the Quick Byte Café, where a security camera captures a figure in a gray stocking cap and sunglasses crouching near her bike, possibly attaching a tracker. Shaw deduces Sophie rode to nearby San Miguel Park, where he finds a shard from her bike's reflector, a bloodstained rock, and her phone ringing in the grass when he dials her number. She threw it as a distress signal before being abducted.

Shaw presents his findings to the Joint Major Crimes Task Force, but Detective Dan Wiley dismisses the evidence. Searching near the park, Shaw discovers a derelict industrial complex with its doors sealed by screws, all but one. Sophie's ex-boyfriend, Kyle Butler, arrives to help but is shot dead by the kidnapper. Sophie is alive, sealed in a dark room with only five objects: water, a glass bottle, matches, fishing line, and a strip of cloth. She fashioned a knife from the bottle and cut through the wall. After Shaw convinces her of his identity, she climbs the smokestack trying to flee but slips. Shaw deflects her fall into an ash pit, fracturing her arm but saving her life.

Wiley arrests Shaw for evidence tampering to cover his own failure, but Supervisor Cummings drops the charges. When a second victim, Henry Thompson, a 52-year-old blogger and LGBT activist, is kidnapped after a Stanford lecture, Shaw develops a theory after Thompson's partner, Brian Byrd, remarks that the kidnapper is playing a sick game. Shaw discovers The Whispering Man, a video game published by Destiny Entertainment in which a villain abandons victims barefoot in dangerous locations with five objects and the challenge to escape or die. The game's first level is called "The Abandoned Factory," matching where Sophie was held.

Detective LaDonna Standish, Wiley's superior and the head of the investigation, reveals herself to Shaw. She has been following him covertly, using him as bait to draw out the kidnapper, and she agrees to pursue the Whispering Man theory. Shaw suspects Tony Knight, CEO of rival gaming company Knight Time, of orchestrating the crimes to destroy Destiny Entertainment, but Knight disproves the theory at a gaming conference. Knight's cofounder and chief game designer, Jimmy Foyle, suggests cross-referencing obsessive players' online activity with the kidnapping times to find who was offline during the crimes.

Destiny Entertainment's CEO, Marty Avon, cooperates fully, explaining that one of the five objects always allows the victim to signal for help. The Park Service confirms a fire in Big Basin Redwoods State Park. Shaw and Standish helicopter to the site and discover Thompson's body at the base of a cliff. He was shot, not killed by the fall.

When a third victim, Elizabeth Chabelle, is kidnapped, Shaw reexamines the evidence. The medical examiner's report reveals Thompson was struck in the face before being shot, confirming the kidnapper never intended to let him survive. Shaw and Standish conclude that Sophie and Chabelle were kidnapped as misdirection to suggest a serial psychotic gamer, while Thompson's murder was the real objective.

Shaw briefly suspects Maddie Poole, a professional video game streamer he has been seeing romantically, after finding a Whispering Man gameplay guide in her home. Maddie confronts him and reveals the booklet was a gift intended to help his investigation.

Shaw and Standish refocus on Thompson's investigative work and discover the true motive: Knight and Foyle had been embedding fabricated news and political propaganda into fake newscasts in their games' loading screens, generating revenue from lobbyists and political operatives. Thompson's blog was about to expose the scheme. Avon's database search produces a suspect: Brad Hendricks, a socially isolated 19-year-old gamer. Shaw visits Brad and concludes the boy is harmless, being framed by Foyle, who as a renowned hacker could easily manipulate server data to make Brad appear guilty.

Shaw sets a trap by bringing items covered in Brad's DNA to Foyle, ostensibly seeking help decrypting the boy's drives. Shaw expects Foyle to plant the items to frame Brad, and the ruse allows Shaw and Standish to follow Foyle to Chabelle's location. They trail him to a remote coastal pier, where a derelict fishing boat called the Seas the Day is sinking with Chabelle aboard. When Standish confronts Foyle at gunpoint, he activates his car's panic alarm as a distraction and shoots her in the arm and abdomen. Shaw applies a tourniquet, calls 911, and sprints toward the ship.

The narrative reconnects with the prologue. Shaw dives into the freezing water, tears away the windshield, and finds Chabelle trapped behind a bulkhead door. Unable to break through, he reasons the door is held shut by unequal water pressure, not screws. As the ship goes under, he dives to the submerged door and forces it open once the water equalizes, pulling Chabelle free. Dan Wiley, whom Standish contacted for backup, hauls them from the water; Wiley had played chicken with Foyle's fleeing car, forcing him into a ditch and arresting him.

Chabelle and her unborn child are confirmed healthy. Standish survives surgery but is permanently reassigned to desk duty. When federal authorities stall Knight's arrest to protect a politically connected client, Shaw rides to Knight's hiding place and confronts him with a $1 million reward announcement, funded from his own resources, set to broadcast worldwide unless Knight surrenders. Knight turns himself in that night.

In the final sequence, Ebbitt Droon, an operative Shaw encountered in Oakland, holds him at gunpoint and takes the stolen documents. Droon reveals that Braxton sent an operative who followed Ashton to Echo Ridge and fought with him; Ashton fell to his death during the struggle. Shaw feels relief that his brother Russell, whom he suspected for 15 years, did not kill their father. Shaw realizes that dog-eared page numbers correspond to coordinates pointing to caves on Echo Ridge, where Ashton hid something worth killing for. The novel ends as Shaw flips a coin between searching for his father's secret and pursuing a new reward in Gig Harbor, Washington, but does not look at the result, having already decided.