Altered Science

ALTERED SCIENCE
By Alex Price

For twenty-two years, senior DNA analyst Franka Leider was the most trusted name in the lab. Her results were flawless. Her testimony sent hundreds of people to prison. Nobody ever thought to check her work, because nobody ever had a reason to.

Then a graduate intern named Lauren Latimer pulls one forgotten case file and finds a number that doesn't add up.

What starts as a small, unglamorous doubt becomes a spreadsheet, then a pattern, then a reckoning that no one in the building is prepared for. Over a thousand cases. Two decades of quietly deleted evidence. A wrongfully convicted man still behind bars. A woman still waiting, years later, for a name the system claimed it never had.

As the truth spreads, it tears through courtrooms, detectives' careers, and the lives of survivors who trusted a piece of paper over their own memory of what happened to them. Franka's composure finally cracks, revealing a decades-old wound she built an entire career trying to outrun, and a betrayal she's never once admitted to the person she hurt most.

But justice, once it finally arrives, doesn't come clean. While the courts weigh what Franka deserves, a detective named Milton Hastings is still working the cases nobody closed, and one of them is about to prove that the damage was never finished. Somewhere out there, a man Franka's evidence should have caught years ago is still walking free. He hasn't stopped.

Altered Science is a forensic thriller about the terrifying gap between trust and verification, and what happens when one person's quiet compulsion is allowed to run, unchecked, for twenty-two years. It asks a question no courtroom can fully answer: how do you put a broken system back together when the truth itself was the first thing anyone altered?