Every incident report tells you what happened. Ray Pruitt's job is finding out what everyone already knew. 

Three men are dead at the Calloway Point gas plant, and the official report calls it equipment failure — unforeseeable, unavoidable, nobody's fault. Ray Pruitt has heard that sentence before. He spent a decade writing it into state reports himself, until he learned exactly how often "unforeseeable" means "ignored." 

Hired by the victims' families with nothing but three folders and a lot of unanswered questions, Ray starts where the company's report stops: the maintenance logs nobody wants to explain, the safety flag someone closed out early, the supervisor who won't return calls, and a corporate safety score that looked perfect right up until it didn't. 

The deeper Ray digs, the clearer it becomes — this wasn't a failure of equipment. It was a failure everyone could see coming, and chose not to. 

Now the company that buried the truth once is prepared to bury it again. And Ray Pruitt is the only one still asking why. 

Root Cause launches The Root Cause Files, a new industrial thriller series for readers who loved The Last Control — grounded in the real methodology of a real safety career, and the ordinary people who become the last line between negligence and catastrophe.