Crown of Ashes

In a fledgling republic still rotting with the poisons of its authoritarian past, a stadium stampede after a historic championship victory is not an accident but a meticulously engineered cover-up. Two men from opposite sides of the old divide—a disgraced intelligence archivist and a vengeance-driven journalist—flee across a desolate, post-industrial wasteland, carrying a secret that both the new state and its buried executioners want erased. This is a road novel of mutual suspicion, corrosive memory, and inevitable destruction, unfolding in the long, toxic shadow of a transition that devoured its children.