Scarlett Knox – författare

A locked bedroom. A journalist murdered in 1976. A case her own mother has never spoken about.When BBC producer Inès Pendarvis inherits a small Paris flat in the 18e arrondissement, she expects an inconvenient summer of paperwork. Instead, behind a door that has been closed for nearly fifty years, she finds the papers of Mathilde Lambert — notebooks, marginalia, and cassette tapes labelled in a careful hand. Mathilde was thirty-one when she was killed. Her case was closed within a month. The man she had been investigating went on to a long and decorated public career.Fifty years later, in the flat where Mathilde once worked, Inès begins to listen.What she hears is the voice of a woman who knew she was running out of time. What she finds, piece by careful piece, is a network of silence that has protected one man for half a century — and the questions her own mother, who left Paris in November 1976 and has refused to come back, has never been willing to answer.By the time Inès understands what she has been left, the people who buried Mathilde's work the first time are still alive, still powerful, and still watching the lights go on in the rue de Steinkerque.A slow-burn psychological thriller of inheritance, silence, and the long shadow of a Paris cover-up.

In the summer of 1926, Nan Tarn is paid three hundred guineas to speak with a dead man.She has no gift. She has fourteen years as a lady's maid, an eye for what a house gives away, and a partner in London who does the research before she does the reading. The Deverels want their son, lost at Passchendaele in 1917 and never found. Nan intends to give them what they want and go home richer.Then a note appears under her bedroom door, written in a young, impatient hand, containing something about that family that she could not possibly know.The notes keep coming. Every one of them is true.By the third séance, a doctor is dead on the down road with his lamps still burning, Nan is falling for two men who want opposite things from her, and she has understood something she cannot put down: somebody in Coldharbour Hall is using her mouth as a weapon.And this house is not haunted by anyone dead.

Norfolk, Virginia, 1943. Alma Deming got away with it.An innocent man is in a federal cell for her work. Her employer has given her a commendation for assisting the investigation. And she has been promoted to run the shipping cage at the film exchange, which means that from now on, nobody signs for a print but her.Then Washington recalls four hundred and six prints for the silver in their emulsions, and fourteen of them are coming home from Buenos Aires with eleven inches of her handwriting inside.She cuts the strip out of the first one in four minutes. Then she puts a loupe on her own splice, out of habit, and finds the pattern has already copied itself onto the film that was lying against it in the roll. Four feet above the cut and four feet below. A quarter of the density, softened at the edges, and perfectly readable.She removed eleven inches. The print made copies.By 1944 Berlin has stopped asking about ships. They want to know what is standing on the ground in Virginia, and there is no chandler's board and no laundry list that will tell her. So a woman with a delivery truck and a standing pass sits at the back of a dark camp theatre twice a month with a manifest on her knee, and reads the American order of battle off the shoulders of the eight hundred men in front of her.By March 1945 nine submarines have left Norway. The United States Navy, reading their signals, believes they are carrying rockets meant for New York. Convoys are rerouted. Escort carriers are put on a barrier line. Men stand on the beach at Virginia Beach every night with field glasses.Alma Deming is the only person on the American coast who knows the submarines are carrying nothing at all.She cannot prove it. She cannot tell anyone without explaining how she knows. And the men who could confirm it are in a building in northern Virginia with no name on the gate, being asked about a weapon that does not exist.Book two of Blank Leader, and the conclusion of the duology begun in Eleven Inches of Silence.

At one minute past midnight on the first of January, 1985, the switchboard at Cinder Fork goes dark and the woman who worked it for twenty-two years becomes a woman nobody in that hollow will speak to.Marion Culp loses his commission the same minute. He is twenty-nine, he is from Ohio, and he opened a sealed mine portal in December without authority and found a boy in eight feet of standing water. He was right, and being right has cost him the badge, the car, the office, and any road back into the case.He has one thing left. A woman is alive in Ohio who has been dead in Rell County since 1973, and if she is alive then somebody else went into the ground under her name, and not one person in Cinder Fork has ever gone looking.Her name was said once, in a drugstore, in the first week of December of 1973. After that it was never said again.Culp works it the only way a man with no authority can. A payroll sheet in a shed with a tin roof. A nursing licence that lapsed for non-renewal in 1975 with no death certificate anywhere in the state. A general delivery card discontinued eleven days after a funeral. A landlady of eighty-one who heard somebody come down an outside stair one night in November and turned over and went to sleep with the wrong idea in her head.And in a drawer in Wheeling, two letters postmarked Ashland, Kentucky, from a sister who wrote four pages every month for six years and started half of them by taking a piece out of her.Two pages. Weather. A job.They are polite, and polite is the one thing that woman never was.Above the town, forty acres of black water sit behind an earthen dam nobody has inspected since 1972. Below it, four hundred people draw their water from wells that were logged in 1961 and never tested. There is a doctor on Depot Street who has kept a ledger since November of 1973 of everything he did not do, and he will answer any question anybody with authority ever thinks to ask him.Nobody has asked. Nobody is going to, until something gives.A POLITE LETTER LIED is the second book of The Cinder Fork Exchange, a slow-burning mystery of buried names and small-town complicity, set in a dying coal hollow where the truth is provable and nobody can prove it.

At 11:48 on a Friday night in October 1984, a telephone rings in an exchange in the West Virginia mountains.It comes in on a line that has been dead for five years.Junia Wickline has worked the night switchboard in Cinder Fork for twenty-two years. She knows every voice in the hollow, and the one whispering to her now says eleven words she will never be able to repeat to anyone. Three days later, a fifteen-year-old boy is reported missing.Deputy Marion Culp is from Ohio, which in Rell County means he is from nowhere. Nobody signs his complaints. Nobody answers his questions. And when he fills out the form on the missing boy, he ticks the box marked RUNAWAY, because he has nothing that says otherwise.It is the worst thing he will ever do.Someone begins slipping pages under his office door in the middle of the night. Block capitals, no signature, on paper torn from a school tablet. They tell him things only one person in the county could know. And when he finally asks the woman he is certain wrote them, she looks him in the face and tells him she did not.She has her reasons. Everything she knows, she learned by listening to calls she had no right to hear, and the only witness who can prove a murder happened is the one witness who can never take the stand.They have until New Year's Eve. At one minute past midnight, the manual exchange is cut over to direct dial, the board goes dark, and nine years of the town's telephone records go onto a truck to be pulped. After that, no call made in Cinder Fork will have existed at all.Above the town, forty acres of black water sit behind an earthen dam nobody has inspected since 1972. Below it, four rows of company houses draw their water from a well that was drilled in 1949. And in a hollow where eleven hundred people know everything about each other, there is one name that has not been said out loud in eleven years.

Eight months after her husband was murdered in their own kitchen,Cora Hale is still cooking dinner for two.She has been a widow for the length of one Maine winter, one Mainespring, one Maine summer—and the only thing she knows for certainis that the man arrested for killing Daniel does not look like amurderer. He looks tired. He looks, in the booking photograph shehas not allowed herself to study, like a man who has lost somethingtoo.Then the letter arrives.Cream-colored stationery. No return address. A handwriting Cora hasnever seen, and a single line she cannot stop reading:I am the man who killed your husband.He does not ask for forgiveness. He does not offer an excuse. Heoffers, instead, an answer to the question Cora has asked the darkceiling of her bedroom for two hundred and forty-three nights:Why us.Why this house. Why a Tuesday in January at one fifteen in themorning. Why the back door, which she had locked, was open. Why thealarm, which she had set, was off. Why a man who had no reason onearth to come for Daniel Hale had been let in by Daniel Hale.Cora writes back.She does not tell her sister. She does not tell the detective. Shedrives, instead, the long road south to a state prison inThomaston, where her husband's killer is waiting at a laminatetable on the other side of a vending machine and a guard with apaperback.And in the small careful country of letters between strangers,across four inches of laminate, then three-eighths of an inch ofgreen-tinted glass, Cora Hale begins to understand what herhusband actually was—And what she is willing to become to set the man who killed himfree.I LOVE MY HUSBAND'S KILLER is a slow-burn literary psychologicalthriller about marriage, grief, complicity, and the terriblequestion every widow eventually has to answer: who was the manshe actually buried?For readers who loved the moral architecture of HEARTWOOD, thedomestic dread of BEHIND CLOSED DOORS, and the quiet, devastatinginteriority of women who have spent fifteen years not asking thequestion that would end everything.A debut novel about the lies we tell at the kitchen counter, thedoors we choose not to open, and the strange grace of finallysaying out loud the thing we have always known.

She took a DNA test on a whim. It led the police to her family. And one of them is a killer.Ren Voss is forty-one, an emergency room nurse, the one everyone in her family leans on. On her birthday she spits into a mail-order DNA tube, half-curious about the origins she never knew. Six weeks later, two detectives are at her door.A nineteen-year-old girl named Holly Swann was murdered in 1999 and written off as a runaway. For twenty-six years the case went cold. Now the science has caught up, and the genetic trail leads straight into Ren's own bloodline. The killer isn't a stranger.The killer is family.As Ren is quietly drawn into the investigation, she tells herself she's protecting the people she loves. But every door she opens leads somewhere worse, every person she clears makes the truth more unbearable, and the closer she gets, the more she realizes the one suspect she cannot bring herself to see is the person standing right beside her—the kind, steady cousin who always arrives when something needs fixing.Because your blood isn't only yours. It's a confession about everyone who shares it. And some people will do anything to keep that confession buried.A slow-burn psychological thriller about loyalty, complicity, and the lies we tell to protect the people we love, The Cousin Who Buried Her builds to a confrontation that will leave you wondering what you would do if the monster at the table had your own face.For readers who love twisty, character-driven suspense and an ending that refuses to look away.

Twenty years ago, on a hot August evening, twelve-year-old Junie Calder walked down to the water to watch the boats and never came home. There was no body. There was no proof. There was only a town that decided what it wanted to believe, and a sixteen-year-old sister who never could.Now the drought has come to Dell's Reach, and the reservoir is giving back what it swallowed. As the water falls, the drowned town of Old Lowater rises into the light: rooftops, a church steeple, the streets where a family once lived. And Frances Calder has come home.Frances reconstructs crimes for a living. Give her the ground and she will tell you where a person stood, where they fell, how far they were carried and by how many hands. She has spent her whole career insisting the ground does not lie. Now she has turned that gift on the one case she could never close, and on the dying old man she has always believed knows the truth.She tells herself she is only reconstructing what happened. She would have parked here. She would have waited there. But there is a thin line between explaining a thing and intending it, and with every quiet hour Frances spends at the water's edge, that line grows harder to see.The lake is almost empty now. Soon there will be nothing left to hide what lies on the bottom. And not everyone who goes looking for the truth is hoping to find it.

In Harrow Falls, the spirits are never wrong.Every Sunday the circle gathers in Eudora Marsh's warm parlor, and sometimes the voice in the dark names a person who is going to die. Weeks later, that person dies. A fall. A drowning. A strong man's heart stopped quietly in his sleep. The mill doctor signs the certificate, the town shakes its head at the sadness of it, and everyone carries a casserole to the widow.Marion Reese knows better. She has spent sixteen years tearing the curtains off fraudulent mediums, and she came to this dying mill town because a woman named Cora Halligan wrote and begged her to come. Cora was pulled out of the wheel pit three days before Marion's train arrived. Misadventure, the constable said. The ice is treacherous this time of year.Cora left a notebook sewn into the lining of her coat. A column of the dead. Pressed flowers gone brown between the pages. And one word, written again and again down the years: garden.It takes Marion far too long to understand what she is looking at.The prophecies are not predictions. They are orders. The flowers are names. And the whole town has been paying for them, in coin and in grief, for thirty years.But the woman who built this thing has been watching Marion for a very long while. She knows what Marion was before she was famous. She knows about the back room, and the low lamp, and the small girl who said whatever the hand on her neck told her to say.And she knows one thing more, which she has not yet decided whether to tell.The river freezes in November. It will not hold past February. And when it breaks, everything in Harrow Falls comes up with it.