She has never forgotten anything in her life. Now she is finding documents in her own handwriting that she cannot remember writing.
Mara Ellison has spent twenty years in the City building a reputation on one quality above all others: she is never wrong about a detail. As senior compliance officer at Albion Crown Bank, she is the person the board wheels out when the regulator needs reassuring.
Then a routine review turns up something that should not exist. Hundreds of small, entirely lawful payments moving through the bank in the same rehearsed order, week after week, each one carefully sized to slip beneath the threshold that would trigger a look.
That evening she finds a note folded under her keyboard, written in her own hand.
Stop looking at Meridian.
She has never heard the word before.
What follows is a compliance report closed six months ago under her electronic signature. An hour missing from an executive meeting she is certain she sat through. A frightened woman in the lift who says somebody found this pattern before, and whom Human Resources insists has never worked at the bank. Her mentor, Helen Vale, gently suggests exhaustion. The bank's occupational psychologist offers an explanation that fits a little too neatly.
Somebody is altering the record. What Mara cannot establish, as the evidence accumulates against her and the people she trusts close ranks, is whether they needed to alter very much at all.
A slow-burn psychological thriller set in the London financial world, for readers who want their protagonists compromised, their villains reasonable, and their endings honest.
What happens when the only witness who can prove the crime may also have committed it?