The Glass Register

In the totalitarian system of efficiency, no one merely has an accident. Joachim Fest might have described a world where insurance investigator Aldric Voss, disillusioned and emotionally hollowed by the cold logic of claims, discovers a pattern of perfect deaths in the city of Krastburg. A staged traffic collision leads him into a labyrinth of fraudulent claims orchestrated not by hardened criminals, but by his own peers—the very arbiters of risk. Stripped of his illusions, Voss finds that the true mechanism of control is not the crime itself, but the systematic destruction of individual will, where victims are manipulated into scripting their own destruction. In a gray universe of files and actuarial tables, he must reconstruct his identity before his mind becomes just another closed case.