The Echo Verdict

In 2047, the courts run on recovered memory. A scan does not lie, a certification cannot be forged, and Nora Vance, senior memory auditor, has signed her name to four hundred and eleven of them. Then a routine confirmation audit lands on her desk: Elias Ward, the Halden Row bomber, two hundred and fourteen dead, convicted by his own memory - a memory Nora finds a flaw in. Inside the condemned man's reconstruction stands a little girl in a yellow raincoat who should not exist. She is nine years old. She is not looking at the bomber. She is looking at the auditor. And she is Nora. The deeper Nora pulls the thread, the more of her own life comes with it: an anchor vault with her rewritten childhood, a mother who died twenty-seven years ago and did not, a signal humming under the floors of the Fidelity tower, and a secret council that decides - for everyone - what true means. To free an innocent man, Nora will have to do the one thing the system was built to prevent: wake the sleeper the system is built on, and let the record testify against its keepers. The Echo Verdict is a propulsive sci-fi thriller of secrets, surveillance and the untidy truth - about a world that outsourced certainty, and the woman who took it back.