Hear the Dead

From award-winning author Ann Dávila Cardinal comes an edgy, genre-bending thriller following a retired photographer who begins to hear the murders of women she knew in her punk youth, forcing her to reckon with the past she's desperate to forget.

One woman. A string of unsolved murders. Only she can hear the victims.

Elena Altieri never wanted to be famous, and certainly not at sixty-six years old. For over forty years she’s been hiding from her New York City punk rock youth, but now, the past is catching up with her in more ways than one. Not only is she losing her hearing, but the photographs she took of a recently deceased musician are going viral, and suddenly, she finds herself thrust into a world she’d hoped to keep locked away forever. 

A world where her best friend, Sin, is dead. 

When Elena begins to hear the screams of a woman ringing among the hum of her tinnitus, she becomes convinced she's hearing Sin’s murder. Desperate for answers, she has no choice but to dig into the past, and what she’ll uncover will not only force her to reckon with her own fractured memories, but might prove that Sin, and other innocent women from their youth, were the victims of an unspeakable crime that only she can solve. Old punks never die, and Elena’s going to prove that.

Edgy, mysterious, and full of heart, Hear the Dead is at once an inventive and biting story following one aging woman desperate to solve crimes from her past, and a thought-provoking meditation on friendship, justice, and what it means to remember who we are.