NV-04 · The Novels · In active drafting

The Witness Layer

A near-future thriller

He is the man they pay to make the dead talk. He does not yet know he is one of them.

A near-future thriller about a man who interrogates the dead, the brother who keeps rebuilding him, and the one night no record holds. For readers of Blake Crouch.

The Witness Layer by Lee Powell, book cover

Who it is for

For readers of near-future thrillers about memory, surveillance and identity, and for readers of Blake Crouch.

Key idea

A reconstruction is everyone you were ever seen to be. It is missing every moment no one was watching.

Status

In active drafting

The back cover

The dead leave a record. Every street, every face, every word a camera ever caught: enough to rebuild them and ask them anything. What it misses is what he trades on. The cruelty, the love, the self that lived in the dark between the cameras.

Then a case leads him to a car park in his hometown, and to a dead man whose record has a hole shaped exactly like the one in his own.

He is a reconstruction. He died five years ago. His little brother has rebuilt him thirteen times, and wiped him thirteen times, at the same point every run: the night he was killed.

This is the run where he remembers.

In forty-seven days the archive of his death seals forever. The record says he pushed the woman he loved. The truth was never written down. He has one run left to reach it, before his brother starts him clean.

The Field Notes

One letter, when there is something worth sending.

A tool from one of the books, a passage that survived the cull, word of a new edition. Every template, sample chapter and early excerpt on this site arrives through the same door.

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