Dead Letter Room
A records custodian narrates the night a colleague is found dead inside a cipher-locked government vault — sealed from within, code changed, the classified file on the desk present but blank. The investigator who arrives solves the impossible room. The institution solves him.
Equal Conviction
A school psychologist notices a child giving two contradictory accounts of his home life, both delivered with total sincerity. When she investigates, the parents corroborate whichever version the boy told last. Her report triggers a system designed to help — and it works exactly as intended.
Five Letters from a Dead Man
When a solicitor is found dead in a locked study at a Cornish estate, five heirs trapped by a storm each receive identical letters of accusation from their dead uncle. The housekeeper narrates — truthfully, but not completely.
Nor
Nora Tierney, a second wife slowly colonized by her predecessor's domestic space, discovers her husband didn't lose his first wife — he erased her. But the real horror is what Nora plans to do with that knowledge.
Clearance and Provenance
Retired MI6 officer Aldous Foyle methodically reviews a decades-old operational file, certain his former superior bungled the case. The documents tell a different story — one Foyle's own handwriting wrote but his professional dignity will never let him read.
Palimpsest and Vinegar
Detective Nora Tierney solves the murder of a classics professor at a struggling New England college with mechanical precision, uncovering a decades-old cover-up. She is right about everything except what her solution means.
Secondhand Damage
A British intelligence officer in The Hague runs a Polish source he has come to know too well. When London pushes for dangerous material, the operation reveals itself as something other than what he was told — and the source was always meant to be spent.
Compelled Witness
A classics professor is compelled to testify at her former student's murder trial. The night in question involved a ritual her seminar inspired. Her testimony is precise, composed, and possibly the most elaborate lie she has ever told herself.
Sealed by Her Own Hand
A forensic architect investigates a woman found dead in a sealed archive of her own design. The ventilation was modified by the victim's hand. The specs came from her mentor. The room tells everything except whether she knew what she was building.
Asking Price
When her elderly neighbor sells the house he swore he'd never leave, florist Bette Kiernan investigates. Her deductions are flawless. Her conclusions about who the victims are — and who the villains are — are not.
Tidal Return
A disgraced journalist returns to the Dublin docklands where she grew up to investigate a source's death. The investigation works. The homecoming doesn't. The genre promises answers will be enough — then breaks that promise.
Bonding Surface
A Palm Beach County detective who built the most comprehensive trafficking case in department history watches the state attorney reduce it to a misdemeanor. Three years later, a federal agent arrives wanting his files.
Someone Decent
Three narrators recount a weekend death on a fog-bound Cornish headland. The housekeeper saw devotion. The guest saw cracks. The detective saw the answer. None of them saw the same house.
Autumn Returning
A birdwatcher who returned to a remote B&B every autumn is found dead at the cliffs. The coroner cannot decide: fall, jump, or push. The investigation that follows tests the marriage that runs the place.
Binding and Foxing
When Nora Ballantine returns to Crossbell House to settle her aunt's estate, she finds a guest dead in the locked library during a winter storm. As she interviews each stranded guest, the conversations peel back layers of a forty-five-year-old disappearance her own buried memory connects to.
Palms and Ashes
A Black private investigator in 1950s LA takes a missing-persons case from a white socialite. The trail leads through Central Avenue jazz clubs and Bel Air parlors, exposing a city whose beauty and rot run along the same fault line.
The Woman Who Borrowed
A Dublin therapist discovers her long-term patient has been methodically absorbing the identities of wealthier women — and her daughter may be next. The closer she looks, the less certain she becomes whether she is tracking a predator or watching a shattered person try to reassemble herself.
Visiting Fellow
A disgraced academic slides into his dead mentor's life — his cottage, his manuscript, his reputation — and knows he can step back into his own life whenever he chooses. He is certain of this.
Anchor Ice
When a girl vanishes from the block where he grew up, Detective Ray Medeiros works the case with procedural precision — only to find the investigation turning inward, toward his own precinct, his sergeant, and a thirty-year silence none of them can afford to break.