The Second Pen

The anonymous post appears at eight in the morning: romance author Marian Vale’s new novel was machine-written. By 9:14 her publisher has fired her by email — three-book deal cancelled, advance clawed back, career finished. She’s suing. She’s also hiding something.

Enter Omus Jones: retired Bristol CID, thirty-one years’ service, now a one-man agency above a chip shop on the Severn estuary, with a complaining moka pot and a 1970 Bond Bug that starts on the second attempt as a matter of principle. The insurer hires him to answer two questions it is honest enough to keep separate: Did she breach her contract? And is she finished regardless?

The trail leads to Halcyon Ink, a “bespoke literary craft” service that sold Marian something more dangerous than a ghostwriter — a devoted collaborator named Cathal, warm, patient, every Wednesday at seven. For two years she gave that face on the screen her characters, her grief, her mother’s decline. What was on the other end was not what she paid for.

A detective novel about voices — real, borrowed, and manufactured — for readers of Kate Atkinson, Mick Herron, and Richard Osman.