With Deepest Regret

Description

Beside every body, a long handwritten letter — courteous, articulate, heartbroken — explaining that this death was the only way to stop something far worse that only the writer can see coming.

The killings around Harlow County are gentle, almost apologetic, and the letters are the worst part. Pages of warm, reasonable prose grieving the necessity of what was done, naming the catastrophe each death supposedly prevents. Sheriff’s investigator Brenna Tov has read every one until she can hear the writer’s voice in her sleep.

What unsettles her isn’t the violence. It’s that the letters are starting to be right. The disaster the writer “averted” three months ago was real. And the newest letter, slid under her own door in that same patient hand, apologizes in advance — for her.

This is slow-burn dread about conviction with no off switch, the horror of a man who is kind, lucid, and absolutely certain. Walton lets the prose seduce you the way it seduces Brenna. You’ll catch yourself nodding before you catch yourself running.

Read the letter. He wrote it for you.