Custody Chain: Book Five of the Ledger City Series

The warehouse said logistics.
The records said custody.

In Custody Chain, Darius Blackman returns to Ledger City with a novel about labor, public contracts, reentry, carceral control, and the hidden systems that keep people moving through institutions long after they are supposed to be free.

Leon Vale needs the warehouse job to be a step forward. Recently out of county custody, carrying debt, family responsibility, and the hope of rebuilding his life, he accepts work at Meridian Civic Logistics under the language of community supervision, transitional work, and public-service rehabilitation.

Then Junie Bell shows him the wrong form.

It is not a shipping manifest.

It is a chain-of-custody log.

And it does not track goods.

It tracks people.

As Leon begins to understand that workers are being moved through public contracts like inventory, Meridian’s connection to institutional power becomes impossible to ignore. Gray vans. Hidden routes. Intake codes. Shift assignments. Transfer holds. Clean paperwork built to make bodies disappear without calling it captivity.

Custody Chain is a social suspense novel about forced labor, reentry exploitation, public procurement, warehouse logistics, carceral systems, and the people brave enough to expose a machine that calls control opportunity.