Savage Mercy

Blurb: By the time Elspeth Vale is offered the job, she has begun writing obituaries for people who are not dead yet. It is a private coping ritual, born from years of covering strangers’ deaths for a failing London newspaper while quietly drowning in debt herself. So when a discreet legal intermediary asks her to temporarily impersonate reclusive infrastructure magnate Julian Morrow at a remote estate on the Northumberland coast, she agrees for the money alone. No interviews. No publicity. Just maintain appearances during a “medical absence” while a merger finalises offshore. The estate is a brutal, wind-hollowed place where every employee speaks to her as though she is already Julian. His housekeeper corrects her posture at dinner. His estranged younger wife, Celia, watches her with open amusement rather than suspicion. And Julian’s childhood friend—a trade union lawyer named Devlin—seems convinced she knows far more about the company’s missing pension funds than she possibly could. The longer Elspeth performs him, the more fragments of Julian’s habits begin infecting her own: his insomnia, his fear of mirrors, his obsession with recording conversations. She discovers hidden tapes where Julian rehearses apologies for crimes he never names. Then the first body washes ashore beneath the cliffs. As financial investigators close in, Elspeth uncovers the truth: Julian Morrow did not hire her to hide his disappearance. He hired her to become the public architect of his downfall. Someone inside the estate is constructing a legal narrative around her impersonation—one designed to transfer accountability for decades of economic sabotage onto a woman nobody would think to defend. But the final revelation is worse: Celia knew Elspeth before this began. And she chose her specifically because Elspeth’s forgotten past is already entangled with the workers Julian destroyed.

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