Personnel Files
The Characters
Start with Alton, Tatum, Reese and Marcus, then meet the people whose lives intersect with theirs. Get to know the characters without giving away the mystery.
12 spoiler-free introductions · 4 additional profiles inside the restricted files.
Story revelations stay closed until you choose to open them.
Start here · Spoiler-free
The four at the center.
Architecture, art and longstanding friendships connect these four lives. Their introductions describe the people you first meet, without revealing where the story takes them.
The architect
Alton Beauchamp
Alton Beauchamp is a celebrated architect, Pritzker Prize winner and founder of Beauchamp Atelier. His buildings bring him into a world of museums, major clients and influential people. Away from that public life, he is Tatum’s husband and a father. His eye for design and precision makes him a natural presence in a story where details matter.
Architecture · Design · Family
The investigator
Dr. Tatum Reed
Dr. Tatum Reed is an art historian and the chief investigator at UnitedAssurance. She understands that a painting’s history can matter as much as its price. Composed and observant, she studies both the evidence and the people around it. Her questions draw readers into the mystery, one detail at a time.
Art · Evidence · Investigation
The project architect
Reese Callahan
Reese Callahan is a senior project architect at Beauchamp Atelier and Tatum’s longtime best friend. Her education includes Middlebury and graduate study in architecture at MIT. She shares the professional world surrounding Alton and a personal bond with Tatum, connecting the novel’s working lives with the friendships beyond them.
Architecture · Friendship · Connection
The managing partner
Marcus Hale
Marcus Hale is the managing partner at Beauchamp Atelier. Educated at Yale and ETH Zurich, the former collegiate rower is known for discipline and composure. He carries a small black notebook and has a reputation for speaking last. His quiet, measured manner makes him a distinctive figure in the firm’s professional circle.
Leadership · Discipline · Composure
Illustrations are intentionally anonymous. Imagine the characters your own way.
Supporting cast · Spoiler-free
Beyond the main four.
Investigators, colleagues and families give the cases their human stakes. These profiles use each character’s introductory role; later developments belong in the restricted files below.
Personnel File 05
Atlanta Police detective
Herb Lewis
Herb Lewis is a veteran Atlanta detective who knows Tatum professionally and respects her abilities. Patient and observant, he listens closely to what people say and notices what they leave out. He brings a local investigator’s perspective to a case that refuses to stay local.
Police work · Observation
Personnel File 06
Herb’s closest sounding board
Cindy Lewis
Cindy is Herb Lewis’s wife and closest sounding board. Her place in the story is personal rather than institutional: she knows the man who comes home from the investigation. Through Cindy, the reader sees something of Herb’s life beyond his badge.
Family · Perspective
Personnel File 07
UnitedAssurance executive
Gordon Atherton
Gordon Atherton is a senior executive at UnitedAssurance and Tatum’s boss. He has to answer for the losses, the clients and the company’s reputation. His conversations with Tatum show how differently an investigator and an executive can understand the same case.
Insurance · Reputation
Personnel File 08
Chief executive of UnitedAssurance
Kyle Sager
Kyle Sager is the CEO of UnitedAssurance. He comes to the problem with an analyst’s attention to patterns and a chief executive’s concern for the wider business. As separate cases begin to resemble one another, he pushes the institutions involved to compare what they know.
Leadership · Analysis
Personnel File 09
The Atlanta homeowner
Victor Keller
Victor Keller is a wealthy Atlanta homeowner with a valuable art collection. The opening crime reaches straight into the privacy he has paid to protect. His response to the danger facing his daughter gives the investigation its first difficult questions.
Private wealth · Vulnerability
Personnel File 10
At the center of the opening case
Claire Keller
Claire is Victor Keller’s daughter. Her ordinary shopping trip becomes the opening encounter of Volume I. Before the story turns to valuations, evidence and institutional pressure, Claire makes the danger immediate and personal.
Family · The human cost
Personnel File 11
Director of the FBI
Étienne Moreau
Étienne Moreau is the director of the FBI when the series begins. His position gives him a different kind of authority from Tatum’s insurance work or Herb’s local investigation. His presence brings the federal government into the world of the cases.
Federal authority · Investigation
Personnel File 12
Beauchamp Atelier employee
Elise Dearhart
Elise Dearhart is a young employee at Beauchamp Atelier. Her perspective comes from the daily work of the office, rather than its public reputation or senior leadership. She is one of the people who keep the firm’s ordinary working life in motion.
The workplace · Observation
Reader discretion
Restricted files.
These sections reveal events, relationships and later roles. Open a file only after finishing the matching volume. The Volume III file also assumes you have read Volumes I and II.
All story notes are closed.
Volume I · Case connectionsMajor Volume I spoilers · Open after finishing Volume I
Herb and the atelier
Herb’s investigation draws him deeper into Beauchamp Atelier. By his final confrontation with Alton, he has a strong theory about the people behind the operations, but belief and proof remain different things.
Étienne Moreau
The discovery of three legendary missing paintings at Moreau’s home changes the public understanding of the case. His institutional authority can no longer be separated from the question of what he has been hiding.
Elise Dearhart
Elise describes office conversations, travel arrangements and fragments she has overheard. Her account gives Herb another perspective on the atelier, but she repeatedly distinguishes what she suspects from what she can actually prove.
Volume I · Chapters 29–30, 39 and 43
Volume II · Historical filesMajor Volume II spoilers · Two additional character profiles
The past is part of the case. These two lives connect the wartime art story to Alton’s later choices.
Personnel File 13
The Austrian custodian
Josef Keller
Josef is the Austrian custodian of a secret inherited from the Second World War. His friendship with the young Alton leads from a farm in Bad Aussee to the hidden collections that shape Volume II. What he safeguards makes the distinction between keeping art safe and returning it to its owners unavoidable.
Custody · Restitution
Volume II · Chapters 13, 16, 19 and 23
Personnel File 14
The wartime art scholar
Dr. Friedrich Keller
Friedrich is Josef’s father, an art scholar working within the German wartime art-confiscation system. His decisions in occupied Paris and near Altaussee alter the fate of paintings for generations. His part in that history complicates any simple account of who saved the art and who had the right to keep it.
Confiscation · Ownership
Volume II · Chapters 4 and 9
Volume III · The consequencesMajor Volume III spoilers · Two additional profiles and later roles
A failed operation and a federal prosecution bring a different kind of pressure to the group.
Personnel File 15
The federal prosecutor
Rebecca Shaw
Rebecca Shaw leads the federal Savile/RICO prosecution. Her task is to turn the government’s investigation into a case that can stand in court. As the defense challenges the origins of the evidence, the difference between a persuasive suspicion and a lawful prosecution becomes central.
Prosecution · Evidence
Volume III · Federal investigation and Chapter 40
Personnel File 16
The French financier
Jean-Paul Marchand
Jean-Paul Marchand is a French financier and private banker with Luxembourg connections. Reese’s unauthorized attempt to have him kidnapped triggers the present-day crisis in Volume III. Her past connection to him gives the operation a personal significance that the rest of the group does not initially understand.
Private banking · Personal history
Volume III · Chapters 1–5 and 42
Where familiar faces now stand
Tatum is now National Security Advisor to President Julian Salomon, and Herb is Atlanta’s chief of police. Their public responsibilities intersect with loyalties formed long before either appointment.
Reese’s unauthorized Marchand operation fractures the group’s assumptions about control. Her separate Georgia criminal case is not resolved merely because the federal prosecution falls apart.
Volume III · Cast of Characters and Chapters 1–9, 40 and 46
These are profiles of fictional characters in Jim Beach’s trilogy, not real-world biographies.
Begin with Volume I
You know their names.
Now enter the story.
An ordinary afternoon in an Atlanta parking deck is about to change. Read the complete first chapter of 201 Seconds and discover where the mystery begins.