Books

Pale Privileges, Dark Roast

Privilege makes survival easy—until doing what’s right means watching your world fall apart. Cody Harris is about to learn that difference.

At twenty-four, Cody isn’t trying to be heroic. He’s trying to stay afloat. After exposing fraud in his family’s business, he walked away with his conscience—and everything else in ruins. Broke and desperate, facing financial deadlines he can’t outrun, he takes the only job available: Candela, a direct-selling company that promises empowerment, purpose, and a second chance.

Cody keeps his head down and does exactly what’s expected. Candela rewards him for staying quiet. But as the company’s values take shape around him, Cody begins to see that his silence has become a form of participation.

Three women force him to reckon with the truth he’s been avoiding:

  • Anne, sharp and driven, the only colleague he truly trusts.

  • Maree, his fiancée, whose steady presence exposes how the compromises he makes at work quietly unravel the life they’re trying to build together.

  • Octavia, incisive and unflinching, who won’t let him look away.

Cody’s not clueless. He’s already made hard choices. But stability has a price, and the deeper he goes, the more he begins to wonder whether staying silent is really the same as staying safe.

Wry, tense, and uncomfortably honest, Pale Privileges, Dark Roast explores the cost of comfort—and what it takes to step away from it once you see the harm it hides.

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Book Details

ISBNs: 979-8-9935906-0-8 (paperback), 979-8-9935906-1-5 (eBook)

Publisher: 18th Hemlock Press

Publication Date: May 23, 2026

Page count: 310 pages

Language: English

Genre: Contemporary Workplace Fiction/Upmarket