He steals from the untouchable. He vanishes into daylight. He's never met a lock he couldn't open-until the one door that leads back to himself.
Kael Tarrow has worn nineteen names and left no fingerprints. For fifteen years, he's moved through the mansions of the wealthy like a ghost-a bookkeeper here, a piano tuner there, a lamplighter who memorizes every window latch and guard rotation. He takes their fortunes and scatters the money into neighborhoods they've bled dry. The oil barons never saw him. The railroad magnates never caught him. The banking families who rule the city of Green Light don't even know he exists.
But someone knows.
Maren Caster, a private investigator who's been tracking the ghost-thief for nine years, has noticed the pattern nobody else sees. The money doesn't vanish into offshore accounts. It lands in the pockets of widows facing eviction, dockworkers with sick children, schoolteachers buying their own supplies. The thief isn't getting rich. He's running a one-man redistribution operation. And she's finally figured out where he'll strike next.
When Kael discovers that the same five families who control Green Light are responsible for his father's death decades ago, the game changes. This isn't about money anymore. It's about dismantling an empire built on foreclosures, wage theft, and the quiet violence of legal paperwork. Armed with a stolen pocket watch that doesn't keep regular time-a watch that has, twice, shifted him through hours or days to escape certain capture-Kael launches his most audacious heist yet.
But the watch is becoming unpredictable. The families are turning on each other. His long-lost sister is about to learn he's alive. And Maren Caster is getting closer than anyone ever has-close enough to ask the one question Kael has been running from his entire life:
What are you actually trying to steal?
Count the Windows is a breathtaking novel of greed and justice, identity and erasure, and the radical act of being seen. Perfect for readers who love the moral complexity of The Goldfinch, the cat-and-mouse tension of Catch Me If You Can, and the simmering class warfare of The Gilded Age.
