Meet Emilia Cross: A First Look at The Eleven Minute Void

Four days from now, my new series begins. Before it does, I want you to meet the woman at the center of it, in her own words.

Here is how The Eleven Minute Void opens:

"If there was a pattern in chaos, I would find it. I had built my career, and by proxy my life, on the ability to extract the faintest symmetries from the highest-order entropy. That's what the firm paid me for: noticing when the numbers didn't add up, even if nobody else could see the subtraction."

That is Emilia Cross. She is the person institutions rely on to catch the thing no one else catches, and she is very good at it, which is exactly why she is so alone when it matters. Because one ordinary afternoon the data goes strangely calm, and inside that calm she finds three transfers that should have nothing to do with each other, riding the same hidden path, timed to the same two-second window. Everyone she reports it to has a reason to wave it off. Her own supervisor calls it a ghost in the wire.

She is the only one still looking when the lights go out.

The Eleven Minute Void arrives August 15. If you want it the moment it goes live, join the list at winter-mysteries.com.