The Fourth Desk

Detective Sarah Chen discovers a black-market trade in stolen memories that leads her to a decades-old conspiracy within the department.

Verity Callender, a locksmith in the market town of Thistlecote, keeps the keys to half the doors in town. When locks she fitted herself begin opening for someone else, she follows a trail of worn brass and old ledgers to a secret the town locked away.

Each winter a body surfaces at the one stretch of the Vendra that never freezes. Detective Sergeant Soren Vail has worked them all, and to catch the killer he must reopen the drowning he filed as an accident twenty years ago, and name the men who let an innocent man die.

A piano tuner with face blindness becomes the only witness to her neighbor's murder, able to describe the killer's voice but never his face. When he learns she cannot identify him, he starts walking through her life wearing the voices of everyone she loves.

A deaf archivist discovers that the security footage she was hired to catalog contains evidence of a murder that hasn't happened yet. When the victim calls her, she realizes the recording is only thirty days old — and tomorrow is the date on the tape.

A disgraced art forger is blackmailed into copying a classified satellite photo for the CIA, but the painting hides a message that gets his handler killed. Now he must decode his own betrayal before the next drop goes wrong.