The Unreliable Witness

At 11:58 p.m., the porch light on the empty house across the street flickered three times.Nora Voss noticed. She noticed the man's untied left shoe. She noticed that her neighbor had changed shoes since nine o'clock. She noticed a car parked six inches farther from the curb than any car had parked there in four years.Four minutes later, she watched a man die.By 12:03 she had all four facts in order. The detective wrote down almost none of them.Nora is an actuary. She reports what she saw precisely, without the fear people expect, and in the order she registered it - a shoelace before a body. Detective Marcus Reyes has spent twenty-two years reading witnesses by how they sound, and Nora sounds like nothing at all. So he turns instead to the neighbor who keeps changing her story, and spends seven weeks building a case against an innocent woman while the only accurate account of that night sits at the bottom of a stack.But every detail Nora gave is checkable.One of them proves the official timeline is a lie.And the lie was written inside the police department.The Unreliable Witness is a novel about which kind of truth gets believed, who gets to be believed telling it, and what it costs to keep saying a true thing into a room that would rather hear a tidier one.