The Axiom of Zero
A novel. Coming in 2026.
A forensic accountant who lost his daughter to a “freak accident” is killing New York’s negligent and powerful, one small nudge at a time, and making every death look like chance. But each one costs him, and the universe collects from his own body. Somewhere in the city’s injury claims, one name keeps coming up.
Every accident has an author.
Julian Vane finds the lie buried in the numbers. Since his four-year-old daughter died in a hospital blackout that everyone called an accident, he has been auditing the city for the careless and the corrupt.
Through a monocle of four-hundred-year-old glass, he sees the city as vectors and stress fractures: the smallest push that turns everyday decay into a fatal accident. Four newtons on a frayed brake cable, and a corrupt developer is killed by a rolling planter. No weapon. No motive anyone can trace. Just bad luck.
But the universe keeps its own books. Every improbable death Julian engineers is billed back to his body, and the interest is compounding. Liora Kress, an insomniac insurance investigator with a bridge collapse in her past, has noticed that rich men are dying at a rate that doesn’t happen in nature. She isn’t looking for a killer. She’s looking for the unluckiest man in New York—and she’s the one variable his glass can’t predict.
The first pages
From Chapter 1, “The Kinetic Potential of Dust”
The world did not look like a painting to Julian Vane.
He sat by the rain-streaked window of Leadenhall, a tea shop that charged eleven dollars for a pot of Earl Grey, and watched the downpour punish the sidewalks of Fifth Avenue. To anyone else, the street was an ordinary mess: black umbrellas bumping into each other, yellow taxis leaning on their horns and throwing up sheets of gutter water, pedestrians splashing through gray puddles.
To Julian, it was a spreadsheet. And every cell was wrong.
A woman across the street dropped her scarf. She stopped to pick it up, the man behind her stutter-stepped, and a cyclist swerved into the bus lane to miss him. Julian felt the waste of it as a physical ache behind his eyes.
Inside, the lunch crowd was thinning, and a speaker in the crown molding buzzed through a saxophone rendition of “Autumn Leaves,” its torn cone rattling on every low C. Julian had cataloged every person in the room within six seconds of sitting down. Threat level: negligible. Predictability: high.
He reached out with a pale, manicured hand, squared the sugar packets to the edge of the menu, and lifted his cup. The Earl Grey had gone tepid, and a thin film of oil had gathered on the surface, an iridescent sheen most people would mistake for a reflection. Julian saw it for what it was: a chemical process, irreversible. Even in a cup of tea, the universe was running downhill.
He set the cup down with a clink. It was time.
He took the monocle from his breast pocket. The lens was cold and heavy, a vitrified compound that felt more like stone than glass, and it never tarnished or scratched. The rim was modern—a thin band of machined titanium housing a processor no larger than a fingernail, joined to the ancient lens by gold filaments too fine to see. It sat dead in his palm, waiting for a signal.
He placed it over his right eye, and the rainy Tuesday vanished.
[SYSTEM ACTIVE.]
[CALIBRATING GEOMETRY…]
It happened in layers. First the color drained—the red of the stoplights, the yellow of the taxis, the wet brown brick—until the street was a monochrome wireframe, a blueprint with the skin stripped off. Then the data flooded in, streams of golden light that laid a shimmering lattice of information over every surface and every moving body.
Vectors drew clean lines where there had only been confusion. Velocity readouts hovered over the cars in blue. Stress fractures in the sidewalk glowed a dull warning red. Around the corner of the building, the wind moved in ribbons of white light.
Julian took a deep breath. The headache of the unsorted world receded.
The chapter continues in the book.
About the author
Nolan Harroway writes fiction about the hidden machinery of cause and effect: the small, overlooked failures that bring large things down, and the people left to count the cost. He has a particular weakness for the physics of minor catastrophes.
His debut novel, The Axiom of Zero, is a thriller about a man who turns that machinery into a murder weapon, and the woman who has to stop him. He is at work on a second, a mystery set during the last thirty nights of an Osaka nightlife building he knows far better than he should. He writes early in the morning, before anything has had a chance to go wrong.
Advance reader copies
If you’re reviewing the book before it comes out, you can read the whole novel online. You’ll need the password from your invitation.