Streets of Blame

In Seattle's fog-drenched Pioneer Square, truth is a shifting shape - and DNA, the very science built to expose it, becomes a weapon in the wrong hands.

Streets of Blame follows Adam Lutz, a man shattered by tragedy and hiding in the city's underbelly after losing everything in a deadly avalanche. When a string of ritualistic murders grips Seattle, Adam's DNA is found at multiple crime scenes - irrefutable proof, the police claim, that he's a monster. But Adam has an identical twin: Donnie Lutz, a respected criminology professor at the University of Washington who has built a career teaching others how to catch men like his brother.

The real killer, however, is someone far more calculating - Ned Strahan, a methodical sociopath obsessed with purity and control. Using stolen DNA samples from the city's homeless population, Ned manipulates forensic evidence to misdirect investigators and settle his own twisted moral scores. By the time his crimes intersect with Adam's desperate existence and Donnie's academic world, three lives - and the fragile boundaries between guilt and innocence - have become hopelessly entwined.

As Public Defender Angie Braun researches the case, she finds herself caught between evidence and intuition, drawn into a moral maze where nothing is as it appears. The deeper she digs into the Lutz brothers' connection, the more she questions the system she's sworn to uphold. Pioneer Square - with its damp brick alleys, shifting fog, and silent witnesses - becomes more than a backdrop. It is a living character: beautiful, dangerous, and unflinchingly real.

Part psychological thriller, part social commentary, Streets of Blame examines the modern faith in science, the unseen lives at society's edges, and the ease with which technology can be turned against the truth it promises to protect. Through alternating perspectives, Darin Hartley crafts a chilling portrait of obsession, loss, and redemption - where every character carries a secret, and every piece of evidence tells a different story.

With its haunting atmosphere and morally complex characters, Streets of Blame blurs the lines between detective fiction and literary noir. It's a story about guilt - the kind that burrows deep - and about the desperate human need to be seen, believed, and forgiven.

Readers of Michael Connelly, Gillian Flynn, and Tana French will find familiar echoes of tension and empathy here, but Hartley's voice is distinctly his own: cinematic, grounded, and drawn from years of firsthand experience working in Pioneer Square, where beauty and decay coexist on the same street corner.

At once intimate and expansive, Streets of Blame asks:
What happens when proof becomes the enemy of truth?
And how do you find absolution in a world that only believes in evidence?