The Cold Chain

Eleanor Cawley vanished from her own front door a year ago. This afternoon her cleaner found her upstairs, in her own bed, under a duvet drawn up to her collarbones, as though she had come home at last and simply lain down.

The house is kept too warm. The carpets are vacuumed to the millimetre. Nothing about the scene is wrong, except everything. Because the woman in the bed cannot have died when the room insists she did, and cannot have been gone as long as the calendar says she was. From the doorway, every instinct DCI Toni Holden owns tells her that what she is looking at is not possible, and that she must not say so out loud yet.

Her husband was three hundred miles away, with the receipts to prove it. The forensic clock has been stopped, wound back, made to lie. And somewhere under the impossible time of death is a simpler, colder truth: that long after Ellie Cawley stopped being able to argue, someone went on deciding who she was.

To give her back her own ending, Toni has to work out not just when Ellie died, but who has been holding the pen ever since.

The Cold Chain is the second DCI Toni Holden novel: a Merseyside procedural about time, control, and the last version of a life.