A crime-fiction series · Peter Hish

FLEECEDNATION

They don't just take the money. They take the thing you don't get back.

Six novels inside a Los Angeles fraud unit that is always one warrant behind the people it hunts. Drawn from twenty-seven years of the real thing.

$95,000 → mule → P2P broker → three blockchains → clean. Eleven minutes. The report reaches the detective three days later.

This is not a complicated country.

Victor Zhang · recovered audio · Fleeced Nation

We keep calling these people victims of non-violent crime. We should start calling them what they are. Casualties.

Det. Tommy Ruiz · Fleeced Nation

Case One · Out to agents

Fleeced Nation

Lead — Det. Ethan Cole · LASD Fraud & Cyber Crimes

A seventy-one-year-old widow hands ninety-five thousand dollars in cash to a stranger in a parking lot. By the time the report reaches Detective Ethan Cole, the money has been split across three blockchains and washed clean in eleven minutes.

One victim becomes a map. Call centers. Mules cut loose before the ink dries. A kingpin downtown who never touches a dollar and lives like a hotel guest. Cole can build the case. Whether the system will let him close it before the desk phone rings again is the whole question.

A standalone crime novel and the opening of a six-book series. 93,000 words. Comps in the vein of Winslow, Sheridan, and Connelly.

Status — Seeking representation

The series · Six books · Rotating leads

Each book hands the badge to a different detective on the same unit.

The scams change. The victims change. The eleven-minute math does not. One team, one city, and an empire that keeps running no matter how many doors get kicked.

01Fleeced NationThe cash-pickup call that maps an entire industry.Ethan Cole
02Supply LineA gold-bar sweep runs into a cartel pipeline while his own life comes apart.Tommy Ruiz
03Ghost FloorThe money was clean before it ever left the country.Isabella Vega · HSI
04Quiet HoursThirty years in, the cost of the files that were left to sit.Patrick Donovan
05Cold WalletA war fought in wallets, mirror transactions, and eleven-minute windows.Anthony Reynolds
06Last MileThe one who kicks the door, and the room he finds behind it.Derek Shaw

Book One complete and in submission. Books Two through Six in development.

The author

Peter Hish worked the desk these books are written from.

Peter Hish spent twenty-seven years in Southern California law enforcement, the last decade running a cyber and financial crimes unit. He worked the cash-pickup calls, the business-email compromises, the pig-butchering files that ran into the millions, and the money that was gone before the report was ever written.

Fleeced Nation is drawn from that desk. He is also the author of Hacked or Hardened, a nonfiction guide to cyber risk for business owners, and he writes on fraud and financial crime for law enforcement and the public.

27 years, law enforcement Cyber & financial crimes The cases are real

The first chapter

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