About the series
Ada Wren, an interpreter, carries meaning between people who share no language. In each book a job takes her into a closed world where someone dies, and she listens for the place where two languages stop matching.
At a glance
- Genre
- Locked-room mystery, literary mystery
- Mood
- Tense, reflective
- Setting and era
- Present day, China
- Pace
- Medium
- Point of view
- First person
- Reading order
- Read in order
- Heat
- Not applicable
The books in order
3 books
Book 1Start here
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.
Book 2
Ada Wren goes to the Swiss Alps on a private job, to record the dying words of a famous colleague as he slips between languages. Snow cuts off the old house, the machine transcript starts to disagree with her, and a body turns up on the frozen lake.
Book 3
Interpreter Ada Wren is flown to a disused observatory in the Chilean Andes, where a mining sale worth billions turns on a 1994 treaty in Spanish and Aymara. The two texts should say the same thing. Ada starts to listen to the language she was not hired for.
Where are you in the series?
Each stop is its own page. Bookmark yours; we save nothing.
- Nothing yet: start with Book 1
Book 1
The Middle Voice
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.
Book 2
The False Cognate
Ada Wren goes to the Swiss Alps on a private job, to record the dying words of a famous colleague as he slips between languages. Snow cuts off the old house, the machine transcript starts to disagree with her, and a body turns up on the frozen lake.
Book 3
The Authentic Text
Interpreter Ada Wren is flown to a disused observatory in the Chilean Andes, where a mining sale worth billions turns on a 1994 treaty in Spanish and Aymara. The two texts should say the same thing. Ada starts to listen to the language she was not hired for.
Get the series
Book 1The Middle Voice
E-book
Paperback
Book 2The False Cognate
E-book
Paperback
Book 3The Authentic Text
E-book
Paperback
Questions
Do I have to read the books in order?
Yes. Each book gives away how the earlier ones end, so read them in the order they are listed.
Where do I start?
With Book 1, The Middle Voice.
How many books are there?
The series has 3 books. It is complete.
About E. J. Hartley
E. J. Hartley writes mysteries and thrillers in which the murder weapon is a sentence. Hartley’s narrators are interpreters, bound by a professional rule that reads like a moral one — you do not change what is said — and every book asks what that rule costs when the accurate rendering protects the guilty, or gets somebody killed.
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