Orphaned

A wealthy young painter who lost both parents on 9/11 goes looking for a tragedy to paint and finds a forgotten paper trail instead, one that leads him straight into the hands of the private intelligence firm that has spent twenty-five years making witnesses disappear.

Nix Varga was eight when his parents died in the North Tower. Twenty years later he is rich, talented and unable to sell a single abstract painting, and everyone around him has the same advice: paint the tragedy. He tries. He fails. Searching for inspiration online, he finds a forgotten forum post about forty-one crates of sealed records that left the tower four days before the attacks, and his father's initials on the shipping manifest. Everyone who signed it is dead. The last of them died three months ago.

At that man's cabin in the mountains, an open house turns into an abduction, and Nix wakes up inside a second conspiracy he knew nothing about. With the dead man's daughter, a paramedic who does not believe her father's heart gave out, he has six days to decode a message hidden in his own painting before the man who buried the truth is confirmed to guard it. Orphaned is an action thriller about grief, money and the one record a father refused to falsify.