She’s Been Dead Six Months – Paperback

“She’s been dead six months.”

Daniel Shore buried his partner, Leo, in March. In September, she walked across the national news.

She was in the background of a police appeal for a missing woman: a figure in a green coat beside a pillar at Manchester Piccadilly, at 18:42 on the night Rebecca Thorne vanished. The crowd flows past. Leo stops. She lifts her head, looks straight up into the camera, and says something.

Neve Calder doesn’t do ghosts. She was once the forensic video analyst detectives asked for by name, until a handful of pixels she got wrong sent an innocent man to prison and ended her career. Now she restores old footage in a converted mill in Ancoats and sends grieving people home with the truth: footage shows, it doesn’t tell. She’s about to send Daniel home too, when his phone lights up with a message from a number that doesn’t exist.

She wanted you to see.

Then the envelopes start arriving at Neve’s door. No name. A memory stick inside each one. And three words on a strip of printed label tape:

LOOK AT THE CLOCK.

Every CCTV recorder burns the time into the picture so it can never be faked. Neve knows those digits better than anyone alive. And beneath the time on the Piccadilly footage, she finds the faint ghost of another one.

Someone has been rewriting the clocks on the city’s cameras, selling alibis one frame at a time. The people who paid for them will kill to keep the real time buried. And the further Neve and Daniel follow Leo’s trail, the more the woman he loved comes apart in their hands: a different name, a past she ran from, and a secret she carried onto a station platform and never brought home.

Somebody chose Neve for this. Somebody who knew exactly what she would find.

The camera never lies. Everyone says so.

A gripping, twist-filled British psychological thriller of approximately 100K words (around 400 pages). Book One of The Last Person on Camera.