- Genre
- Mystery thriller
- Published
- 2021
- Pages
- 356
- Format
- Signed paperback
2021 · Mystery thriller
A Quiet Potion
Every debt is paid in blood.
A forensic accountant finds a dead man's handwriting in books dated after his funeral.
Signed by hand · Personalized inscription · Ships in 5–7 days
Synopsis
Auditors miss things. Nadia Fen does not. Hired to tidy the estate of a financier who drowned six months ago, she finds two ledgers in his study: the immaculate one the family lawyers gave her, and a second, unlisted ledger — written in his hand, filled with transactions dated after his funeral.
Every entry in the dead man's ledger is small, deliberate and wrong. Withdrawals routed through churches, orphanages and a single fishing charter that sails twice a year with no cargo. Someone is honoring a decades-old debt, and the payments are getting larger.
When the charter's captain turns up dead, Nadia realizes the ledger isn't a record of payments. It's a schedule. And the final entry, eleven days from now, has her own name in the memo line.
An excerpt
"The entry was dated nine days after the funeral. The handwriting was unmistakable — the over-closed loops, the numbers that leaned into their neighbors like conspirators. Nadia had reconciled six years of this man's accounts. Dead men do not keep books. Unless what they are keeping is not books at all."
— A Quiet Potion, chapter one
What readers say
"The most original premise in recent thriller fiction, executed with cold precision."
Ledger & Crime
"Debut of the year. Nadia Fen belongs beside the great investigators."
The Southern Bookman
