A legendary detective, Cora Blake, wakes on a theatre stage: blood on her palm, a bound man dead beside her, and thirty-seven strangers pointing at her. She clears herself, coolly — the blood is dry, her nails are unbroken. He died first; he was tied afterwards.She does not remember the dead man. She does not remember herself. A needle mark at her temple and one photograph on a locked screen pull her down a twenty-year trail: her mother's death, the Hartwell family's buried bloodline, and someone who has been photographing her since she was a child.The amnesia was not an accident. The wiped blood, the tidy knot, the evidence left behind — every piece of it was a script written in advance. And the rookie officer who kept saving her life, Miles, is the man holding the pen.Every clue she finds points backwards. Every person who helps her is writing the next page. Somebody has been practising her mother's handwriting for twenty years, signing her name on every paper that was supposed to say her death was an accident. Twenty episodes, one line of inquiry, one answer — and ten minutes left to ask for a truth she may not survive.
