False Record is the book I had been building toward since I wrote the first Brandon Powell novel. By the time I sat down to write it, I had a character I knew deeply, a setting I understood instinctively, and a real-world backdrop — the Murdaugh scandal and its aftermath — that gave the story an urgency I could not have manufactured.

This is how it came together.

The Murdaugh Backdrop

The Alex Murdaugh case captivated the country for reasons that go beyond the crimes themselves. It was a story about the way wealth and legal connections can insulate people from accountability for decades — until, suddenly, they cannot. It was about the gap between a family's public reputation and its private reality. It was about a legal community that looked the other way for years.

For a writer who has spent a career thinking about the abuse of legal power, it was impossible to ignore.

False Record is not a retelling of the Murdaugh case. Brandon Powell is not Alex Murdaugh, and the novel's plot diverges significantly from the real events. But the atmosphere — the Lowcountry setting, the old-money legal dynasties, the sense that certain people have always operated by different rules — is drawn directly from that moment in American legal history.

Why Georgia?

The previous Brandon Powell books were set primarily in South Carolina. False Record moves the action into Georgia, specifically the coastal Lowcountry region that shares the same geography, culture, and social dynamics as the South Carolina Lowcountry.

The shift was deliberate. I wanted Brandon Powell operating in territory that was familiar but not home — close enough to his world that he could read the room, far enough that he did not have the same network of relationships to fall back on. That slight displacement raises the stakes in ways that a purely familiar setting would not.

The Georgia Lowcountry also gave me access to a slightly different legal and political landscape, which opened up plot possibilities that would not have been available in the previous books' settings.

The Structure of the Deception

The title False Record refers to something specific in the plot — a document, or a set of documents, that has been altered to conceal a crime. I will not say more than that without spoiling the story. But the concept of the false record — the official version of events that does not match reality — runs through the entire novel as both a plot mechanism and a thematic concern.

Brandon Powell has always been a character who insists on the actual truth rather than the official version. In False Record, that insistence puts him in direct conflict with people who have spent years constructing and maintaining a false narrative. The collision between those two forces is the engine of the book.

The Writing Process

False Record was the most research-intensive book I have written, even accounting for my professional background. The specific legal and procedural details of the Georgia court system, the geography of the coastal region, the timeline of the Murdaugh case and its public reverberations — all of it required careful attention.

I also spent more time on the supporting characters in this book than in the previous two. By the third novel in a series, readers have expectations about the world you have built. Honoring those expectations while still surprising people is one of the more interesting craft challenges in series fiction.

Now Available

False Record is available now on Amazon and directly through this site. If you are new to the Brandon Powell series, I recommend starting with Abuse of Process — but False Record is also designed to work as a standalone for readers who want to jump in at the current book.

Either way, I think you will find Brandon Powell worth knowing.