Second Witness - Paperback

Cara Elliot has used her podcast Second Witness to explain how memory works and how easily it fails. She's built her audience on rigorous skepticism and the conviction that the truth, if you're patient enough, is findable. Then a five-word DM sends her to a small town in the South Carolina Lowcountry, where a man named Marcus Webb is serving year eleven of a sentence built almost entirely on eyewitness testimony.

The witnesses remember the same things. They use the same words. Cara can't explain it, until she finds a name buried in a sealed civil lawsuit: ClearRecall, a legal-tech company that promised to sharpen witness recollections before trial. What it actually did is something else entirely.

Second Witness is a novel about what we owe the wrongly convicted, what happens when technology is used to manufacture certainty, and what it costs a journalist to pursue a story that powerful people want buried. It's also about Cara Elliot: rigorous, compulsive, right more often than is comfortable, and about to learn that being one step ahead of the story isn't the same as being safe.