Release Announcement
The Long Kindness: nine boxes, nine days, 11 September
The Long Kindness is out on 11 September. It is a literary mystery, which is a different animal from the last book, and I want to be straight about that before anyone buys it expecting the same ride. Jo Fenn empties the houses of the dead. She is good at it, and she has one rule that has kept her honest for twenty-one years: everything that comes out of a house goes on the manifest, and the manifest is the truth. She has nine days to clear a condemned cottage on a collapsing North Sea cliff. On the tenth the machines come, and the house and everything left inside it go into the water. In the back bedroom there is a shelf. On the shelf there are nine document boxes, numbered in black marker, every one of them with her own name on the end, in a stranger's handwriting. Box six is missing. There is no villain in this book. I mean that exactly. Everything frightening in it is a document, a procedure, or somebody being kind. It is fair-play to the last clue, and the clock is real: nine days, and the tide does not negotiate. Sixty-three chapters. You know what I am going to say about your night.