The Middle Voice

About this book

Interpreter Ada Wren flies to a storm-bound retreat above the Li River to carry a billion-dollar deal between two languages. When the founder is found dead in the flooded gorge, everyone calls it a drunken fall. Ada heard his last words, and knows better. A locked-room mystery.

Ada Wren interprets for a living: she stands between people and carries their meaning across the gap. Hired as the personal human interpreter for the sale of the world’s most valuable AI-translation company, she flies to a fog-wrapped retreat carved into the karst mountains above the Li River — the valley where her late mother was born, and where Ada has never set foot. Over eleven storm-bound days a billion-dollar deal turns lethal. The founder is found dead in the flooded gorge, and everyone agrees it was a drunken fall. Everyone but Ada, who alone heard his last words, and knows they were a lie. Trapped by rising water with a corpse it is nobody’s interest to call a murder, she does the only thing she knows how to do: she listens — for the place where two languages stop matching, where a translated account carries a detail its speaker could not have known, where the machine transcript and human memory diverge. Because the killer, like Ada, is a creature of the gap. And the dead man left her a single sentence to decode before it decodes her. A locked-room mystery about what is lost, and kept, in translation.