The Wife Who Answered Twice

A dead woman’s voice should not be able to answer the telephone twice.

Arthur Vance has spent sixteen years sitting with the bereaved, listening to what grief does to memory, certainty and the stories people tell themselves in order to survive. When Julian Holbrook comes to him after the death of his wife, Clara, Arthur expects another difficult case of mourning.

Then he hears the recording.

Clara drowned beside an Essex estuary on a storm-dark October night. Her death was ruled an accident. But among the files she left behind is a telephone call that does not fit the official account, followed by hundreds of recordings that raise questions of their own.

Arthur begins listening.

What starts as professional curiosity becomes an increasingly dangerous private investigation through telephone logs, recovered audio, engineering records, tide tables and the accounts of people connected to Clara’s final months. Each discovery brings Arthur closer to understanding Clara’s final hours, and further beyond the ethical boundaries of the profession that has defined his life.

Because records can establish facts without containing the whole truth. A voice can be genuine and still deceive. And the man sitting across from Arthur each week may know far more about his wife’s death than grief alone can explain.

Set among the tidal flats, sea walls and shifting waters of the Essex coast, The Wife Who Answered Twice is a psychologically intricate literary mystery about grief, evidence, professional obsession and the terrible distance between what happened and what can be proved.

For readers drawn to intelligent, atmospheric mysteries in which character, moral consequence and the smallest pieces of evidence matter as much as the solution.

Enter a mystery where every recording preserves something, every record leaves something out, and listening too closely has a cost.