Some warnings arrive too late to matter. Mara Lin, a risk modeler at Archer and Plaut in Chicago, lives with an algorithm for everything—how long a hospital will take to default, which storms will bankrupt a carrier, the odds that her husband, an ER doctor at Northwestern Memorial, will come home before midnight. She has a corner loft in the West Loop, a closet of sleek suits that never wrinkle, and a sleepless mind that fritzes into fugue states she pretends are harmless. After the unsolved shooting death of her older brother years back in San Jose, Mara learned to quantify fear and keep moving.
Then a courier delivers an invitation encased in a palm-sized shard of tempered glass, its edge inked with a crosshair and a date. The Meridian, an elite private club with a subterranean range beneath the Old Main Post Office, opens its doors. There Mara meets Sabine Kroll, a dazzling philanthropist whose family name is etched onto half the benches in Millennium Park, and Colton Reyes, a former federal negotiator who calls himself a coach rather than a handler. At The Meridian, precision is a form of grace. The club boasts a humanitarian arm, Project Halo, that funds relocation for women fleeing violent partners and supplies trauma kits to clinics from Detroit to Juárez. Belonging feels like breath after a long hold.
But numbers whisper when you know how to listen. The probability curves Mara builds for Archer and Plaut begin aligning with obituaries, and the philanthropic disbursements from Project Halo map onto a shadow derivatives book someone is using to profit from sudden vacancies across boardrooms in Seattle, Charlotte, and Zurich. A ballistic report surfaces bearing her late brother's initials and a stamp from a weapon locker she thought only existed in a childhood nightmare. In a storage unit on Canal Street, behind her mother's old sewing machine, Mara finds a rain-warped folder labeled Glasshouse—inside, actuarial tables written in her father's tight engineer script. He died a decade ago. Or so everyone said.
As Chicago swelters under a heat advisory, Mara pieces together a scheme that turns lives into numbers and numbers into blood. The Meridian selects targets to shatter markets; Archer and Plaut prices the fallout; Project Halo launders the goodwill. Sabine is not just a benefactor—she is kin through a long-quiet affair that twisted two families into one silence. The final ledger confronts Mara on the forty-seventh floor of 150 North Riverside, storm glass bowing, the river below black as a gun barrel. She can play along and live, or reroute the algorithm so the crosshair returns to the shooter. Wickedly twisty, Shattered Target is a psychological and corporate thriller about prestige, betrayal, and the ruinous legacy of secrets, where every model can be gamed and every truth recalibrated after the last, shattering shot.
