Evelyn Cross dies at her desk.The ruling is suicide.Operations resume within the hour.No alarms sound. No investigation follows. The system absorbs the loss and moves on.Marla Ruiz's job is to know when intervention becomes impossible. She doesn't chase killers. She audits silence. And what she sees after Cross's death is far more unsettling than violence-a city learning how to wait.As emergency protocols are quietly optimized and responsibility diffuses across layers of policy, near-misses begin to disappear into clean reports and acceptable margins. Every delay is justified. Every outcome is framed as success. Nothing looks wrong-until someone dies in public, and the system can no longer explain itself.There is no mastermind behind what's happening.No grand conspiracy to expose.Only a structure that has learned how to normalize harm without naming it.The Silent Threshold is a restrained, high-intelligence thriller about systems under pressure, the danger of procedural certainty, and the cost of silence when efficiency replaces judgment. It's a story where tension comes not from what explodes-but from what never triggers an alarm.For readers who prefer moral complexity over villains, process over chaos, and consequences without spectacle, this is a thriller that lingers long after the final page.