THE ADJUDICATOR

Before he can rule on anyone else's verdict, Judge Zione has to face his own.

Judge Zione has built a career - and a marriage - on giving every case the full weight of his conscience. He reads the hard files four times. He loses sleep over the ones no one else would. His wife, Ihouma, knows this about him better than anyone; it's part of why she married him.

Then a case lands on his docket that no amount of careful reading can prepare him for. The defendant is a boy named Kollie, barely old enough to understand what's happening to him. The defense attorney is Ihouma.

As the trial unfolds in front of a courtroom that doesn't yet know what the court reporter has already started to suspect, Zione is forced to confront two verdicts at once - the one he owes the boy in front of him, and the one he's spent thirty years running from: a porch, a father figure named Cess, and a single sentence that shaped every ruling he's made since.

The Adjudicator is a courtroom drama about the difference between being acquitted and being free - and about what it costs two people who love each other to stop needing a verdict from anyone but the One who already gave one. Told with the tension of a legal thriller and the honesty of a marriage under real pressure, this is a story for readers who want their fiction to hold both a gripping case and a true reckoning.