Kept House
A daughter describes her quiet life with her mother in a small Missouri town — the gardening, the casseroles, the neighborly care — in a voice so warm it takes pages to notice she has never once used the word steal.
Dragging the Channel
When an internal affairs investigator at the Boston Police is tasked with finding a leak inside the narcotics unit, the trail leads back to the housing project where he grew up — and to the two childhood friends he has spent thirty years trying not to think about.
Sun Damage
A woman in Memphis confesses how her business partner pulled her into an insurance scheme that was supposed to be clean, until desire wrecked the geometry and the bodies started telling on them both.
Presumptive Pink
A Black private investigator in 1957 Los Angeles takes a case from his oldest friend — a missing partner, stolen money, families who need help. Every layer he peels back reveals another lie, until the friend himself is the thing Nate has spent his whole career fighting.
Wound Tally
Darnell Greer runs a property con on a Harlem block he knows better than its owner. When a woman from the next street figures the scheme and wants a cut, the negotiation cracks the composure he has worn since Korea.
Everybody's Genius Plan
A mail sorter with a gift for reading smudged addresses designs a flawless plan to steal a twenty-foot copper rooster from a Detroit plaza. His crew of four has five different plans. None of them work.
Sufficient Evidence at Sjöbo
A retired Swedish detective's formal internal review of a 1993 murder case in Skåne slowly disintegrates, the procedural language cracking to reveal a man who stopped investigating at the moment the evidence pointed away from the convenient suspect.
Peat and Testimony
A sergeant in a dying Scottish port town stands over a migrant worker's body in a peat cutting face. The story moves backward through the months of institutional indifference that made the death inevitable.
Each Winter Explained by the Last
A retiring Swedish detective drives past the care facility where a Bosnian refugee died six years ago. The drive becomes a reckoning — looping through winters, interviews, and the room she entered and never truly left.
Caulk and Quiet
A drifter named Teague takes a job caulking windows at a Mississippi river house. The widow Cordell needs something else — something her drowned husband started building in the cellar. Teague tells himself it's just labor. The house knows better.
What the Creek Said
In a dying hill town in east Tennessee, a group of teenage girls orbits their fierce leader, Jolene, who has taken an interest in a strange boy living alone in a creek-bottom shack. What begins as a dare becomes a reckoning with the land, loyalty, and what the girls are willing to become.
Sixty Counts
A former prosecutor sits in a rented room with a banker's box of copied documents, reconstructing how her boss destroyed a 60-count trafficking indictment from inside the grand jury.
Owed Ground
Two Glasgow detectives and a council clerk converge on a dead man whose name vanished from a housing waiting list. The investigation reveals that the city's architecture of favors reaches further than any of them can afford to know.
Every Number a Name
When a stroke locks her father's words away, Nadine Ayers inherits his numbers ledger and the east side of Detroit — every debt, every favor, every name — at twenty-three.
Passage to Lausanne
On the overnight train from Zurich to Lausanne, a woman listens as her seatmate describes something that may be a crime, a fantasy, or a proposition. By the time the train arrives, one of them has changed. The question is which one.
Dead Reckoning at Beulah
A sawmill laborer confesses to killing his employer at a Louisiana timber salvage operation. The affair with the wife was simple enough. But the confession keeps breaking open, circling back through a century of land grants, debt, and a patriarch's design that consumed everyone it touched.
The Forger's Margin
A forger who specializes in replicating people — their signatures, their habits, their lives — takes a job impersonating a dead art dealer. But the dealer may not be dead, the client may not be a client, and the forger discovers too late which version of the job is real.
Narrow Filaments
Paroled ex-hacker Everett Colson works gig delivery in near-future Oakland, his every movement tracked by compliance software. When a 4 AM route sends him past a ghost from his old life, the system and the temptation start speaking the same language.
Sung and Spoken For
Alistair Geddes, kirk elder and session clerk in Kilndarroch parish, narrates one Sunday from service to pub in the warm voice of a man the community trusts completely. Three wives have died on his watch. The parish has sung through each one.