The Ninth Berth

About this book

Interpreter Lena Marsh boards the Trans-Mongolian sleeper in Beijing to bring her father’s coffin home. At the Chinese border the crate is opened, and the body inside is a stranger’s. The train cannot stop, and the men who made the swap are aboard. A tense train thriller.

Grief she could manage. The body in the coffin she could not.

When conference interpreter Lena Marsh boards the Trans-Mongolian sleeper in Beijing to escort her father’s coffin home to England, she thinks the worst is behind her. Then a customs delay at the Chinese border forces the crate open — and the man inside is a stranger.

Her father is gone. The train cannot stop. And somewhere in the next carriage ride the men who made the swap.

Six days. Seven thousand kilometres. Three borders. Fluent in the languages of everyone around her, Lena is the only person on the K3 who can hear what is really being said — and the only one who knows the quiet clockmaker she buried was never quiet at all. As the rails carry her west through Mongolia and into Russia, she pulls at a thread that runs from a forged customs seal to an encrypted ledger a great many powerful people would kill to keep buried.

To get off the train alive, she will have to learn who her father truly was — and decide what a daughter owes a man she never really knew.

A claustrophobic, continent-spanning thriller for readers of Paula Hawkins, Agatha Christie’s Murder on the Orient Express, and the slow-burn conspiracy novels of Robert Harris. Board at Beijing. You won’t want to get off.