The Next Reveal

Edinburgh, 2031. Two years ago the encryption broke. Nothing was destroyed. Everything was remembered. Twenty years of stored messages, recorded by anybody with a tap and the patience to keep them, can now be read. Not all at once: reading costs compute, and compute is rationed, so the past opens one slice at a time, in an order the state decides. If your name is in a slice, a letter tells you the date. It does not tell you what is in it. Nineteen days before a slice from the summer of 2014 is due to open, the man whose messages it contains is found dead in a Leith stair. Everybody in the incident room reaches the same conclusion: somebody wanted those messages buried. DI Ailsa Rennie has one objection, and it is only arithmetic. Killing him cannot stop the disclosure. The messages will arrive on the day they were always going to arrive. So the murder was never meant to prevent the truth. It was meant to decide what the truth would say. Ailsa has nineteen days. She has a mother who has waited seventeen years for an answer, a man twice failed by the courts, a queue that somebody has been paying to jump, and a letter of her own lying on the mat at home with a date on it. A cold, quiet, unnervingly plausible crime novel about the moment the past stopped being over.