Desperate Windows (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9798249078102)

He wakes in the dark on a steel plate, and the plate begins to tilt.

Daniel Rowe has been missing for four days. Somewhere in a room he cannot see the edges of, a voice above him says stand in the centre and breathe normally - and a blade rises out of the floor in time with his breathing. Panic, and it comes faster. Stay calm, and it comes anyway.

DS Laura Bennett has three traffic cameras switched off in a fifteen-minute rhythm around the junction where Daniel disappeared, a shape on a map that nobody upstairs believes in, and forty-eight hours before the case goes on the pile.

The man who took him is not a sadist. He is an instrumentation engineer with nineteen years of notebooks, a wife who died at twelve minutes past four one November morning, and a question he has never persuaded a single person to look at: when she died, nineteen monitors on three floors lost synchronisation for one and a half seconds, and the hospital wrote him a paragraph about it.

He believes something is left where a person dies. Not the room. The point in space. And that once a year, the Earth comes back past it.

He has two hundred and six dates in a file.

One of them is nine days away.