The Answer Key

Description

Every scene is a puzzle, and every puzzle points to the next person who’s going to die. Solve it fast enough and you might save them. Solve it at all and you learn something you buried about yourself.

Detective Wren Okafor is good at riddles — too good, the kind of good that gets you handed the cases nobody else can read. This one arrives as a chalk equation on a basement wall beside a body posed like a hanged figure on a gallows. Crack it, and it gives an address. The address gives another body, and another riddle, and the sick understanding that she is not chasing a killer. She is being tutored by one.

The clues are clever. They’re also wrong in a way only Wren would notice — because they’re built out of things that happened to her, a childhood she scrubbed from every file, a name she hasn’t said in twenty years. Whoever this is knows the version of her that doesn’t exist on paper. She should recuse herself. She should walk it up the chain. Instead she sits down with the next puzzle and starts to write.

A serial-killer thriller wired like a trap that springs both ways, this one makes the detective’s own past the final clue. The dread builds with every answer, because every answer is correct, and every correct answer costs her a little more.

Pick up the chalk. He’s grading on a curve.