By My Own Measure

Seventy people were stripped of everything they built. One of them was just found dead in the stairwell.

Every October, Adrian Bexley hosts the Founders' Dinner at the top of his tower in Bezel, South Carolina. The table is forty feet of black walnut, and it is set for one. The other seventy guests stand along the wall in their work clothes. Each of them once owned a company Bexley bought or bankrupted, and he locked each of them out of their trade and hired them to scrub his floors and sort his mail. They watch him eat seven courses. Then they eat what he leaves.

This year, a man walks a plate down the line and slips a note into Marcus Hale's hand: Trust nobody. Not even the old man.

By midnight, that man is dead at the bottom of the north stairwell.

Marcus lost his trucking company, his home, and his wife in the years after Bexley took everything. Now he's being followed. Someone has been inside his house. His daughter's exam schedule is being recited back to him by a stranger in a gray sedan. And in the basement Bible study where a handful of the "Seventy" gather to pray, someone is feeding every word to the man upstairs.

Behind a dead boiler, an eighty-four-year-old night guard keeps a wall of chalk names in the exact order of Bexley's trophy case. Two honest brothers in the foothills below Table Rock are refusing to sell the one piece of land Bexley can't live without. And Bexley's own assistant has just found a badge record she was never meant to see.

As the Upstate mill country tightens around them, Marcus must decide who to trust. Evidence disappears, and a family business burns. Each of them faces a choice that will cost everything they have left.

Inspired by one of the strangest and most haunting passages in the Book of Judges, By My Own Measure is a psychological thriller about power, guilt, and the justice we deal out to others. It also asks whether grace can reach even the man at the head of the table.

"As I have done, so God hath requited me." Judges 1:7