A door is opened in South Sudan-and the air inside feels sanitized. Not because it is safe... but because someone has learned how to make horror look professional.A cooler is humming in the corner. Tubes are arranged with practiced care. Ice packs sit stacked like currency. Consent forms are waiting on a clipboard, boxes already checked. In this room, a signature is not permission. It is inventory.Aaliyah, a UN investigator trained to document atrocities, expects brutality in the open-militias, mass graves, chaos. What is found instead is precision: a quiet, organized pipeline built to move human bodies the way the world moves cargo. Extractors. Couriers. Clinics. "Receivers." A chain of hands that never touch blood, yet profit from it.The deeper the digging goes, the cleaner it gets.Witnesses are silenced or bought. Evidence is "misfiled" mid-transfer. Reports are stamped, notarized, and transformed into lies so polished they pass as truth. Every door that should open is locked by someone smiling behind it-helpful, credentialed, protected. And every time the top seems reached, it becomes clear that only another level of the same machine has been found.Then the investigation is turned back on its investigator.UN blue appears where it should not. Radios crackle with warnings that do not use names. Friendly faces become watchers. Aaliyah's movements are tracked, her contacts are pressured, her access is revoked one signature at a time. Her career is dangled like a leash: cooperate, and the badge stays; insist on the truth, and she is rewritten as unstable, obsessive, expendable.A mark begins to follow her-an eye between spirals-appearing on sealed files, on doors that were supposedly empty, in the margins of cases that were supposed to be unrelated. It mirrors the pendant at her throat like a signature she never agreed to wear... as if she has been watched long before she started watching them.And just when the case becomes lethal, it becomes personal.A call from Newark shatters the last boundary between work and life: her mother has been detained. Fast-track deadlines begin to count down. Cold rooms. Harsh lights. A system that erases families with a stamp and a file number. Suddenly, the investigation is no longer only about strangers in faraway places-it is about the one person Aaliyah cannot lose, and the one weakness her enemies can finally use.Now she is trapped between two merciless machines-one that sells bodies, and one that disposes of people on paper.Expose the network, and she is made a target.Stay silent, and complicity is accepted as survival.To stop the pipeline, alliances will be tested, secrets will be traded, and trust will be treated like a luxury. From dusty airstrips and night raids to marble halls and closed-door briefings, every step forward will be paid for-sometimes with money, sometimes with reputations, sometimes with blood. Borders will be crossed in the dark. Meetings will be held in rooms without windows. Messages will be deleted as soon as they are read. Because the people who profit from human lives do not negotiate-they erase.And the closer Aaliyah gets, the more the question changes from "Who is doing this?" to "How far does it go?"With the clock running out on her mother's fate and the net tightening around her own, Aaliyah is forced to choose what no investigator should ever be asked to choose: a case that could expose an empire... or a family that could be destroyed in silence. In a world where truth can be buried with a stamp, she must make it scream.THE PRICE OF BODIES is a relentless international thriller about power disguised as procedure, corruption hidden behind credentials, and the terrifying ease with which the world can turn a human being into a transaction.Because when everything has a cost... the truth is always the most expensive thing to claim.
