The Moment the City Was Edited

Every thriller has a moment where the floor drops out. In The Eleven Minute Void, it arrives early, and it is quiet, which somehow makes it worse.

Emilia is at a window when the power dies. She expects the ordinary ugliness of a blackout: the scramble, the sirens, the confusion. Instead she gets something eerily controlled. "Outside, the city was being edited." The lights go dark building by building, in a perfectly timed sequence that rolls across downtown like dominoes, and then, exactly eleven minutes later, they come back, in the wrong order, as if someone were restoring the world on their own terms.

And when it is over, the record says none of it happened.

That is the engine of the whole book, and of the series behind it. Not an accident. Not a malfunction. A decision, made by someone, and then erased. The only proof left is a woman who was paying attention when no one else was.

The Eleven Minute Void arrives this Saturday, August 15. Join the list at winter-mysteries.com so you do not miss it.