How To Kill A Crime Writer – Sarah Lotz (1)

I couldn’t use my mother’s fingerprint to unlock it for obvious reasons, and I wasn’t a competent hacker, so I had no choice but to play password roulette. I tapped in my name. Nope. Then I tried ‘Brian’. Then ‘Brian the Cat’. Then, reluc-tantly, ‘Leah Rebecca Overton’. Nope. Ha! After ten minutes of winging it with variations on names and dates, I gave up and just typed in PASSWORD. Which worked. FFS. I’d expected the laptop to be frozen in time – it had been months since it had last been updated – but the tech goddesses were on my side, and my mother’s email account came straight up.

But because it was the most likely repository of secrets I’d rather not know about, I decided to leave it till last. I wasn’t sure what kind of secrets, because being a woman, and not in a relationship, it was unlikely that she’d been harbouring a second family (a double domestic load for a start, and how would she have hidden the pregnancies?)

But also, there was something deeply melancholic and lonely about seeing it still open, blithely going about its business, which made me think about all the other orphaned accounts that must be out there, living on after their owners had died. A digital graveyard, only unlike free spirit Thelma’s neigh-bourhood, this virtual world of the dead wasn’t restful, seeing as it was kept alive by relentless spambots and desperate scammers.

I delved into the documents and folders, none of which were password- protected, and mirroring the analogue stuff, were all neatly labelled. The MacBook was fairly new, and because my mother had been crap at backing anything up (she’d distrusted the Cloud in a very Leah-esque way), the contents were relatively sparse.

I clicked on one entitled, NEW LEAH. At least I’d now get to see what she – and presumably, Leah – had been working on. Up came the title page, Over It: A PI Leah Rebecca Overton Thriller, which made me smile, because ‘Over It’ was exactly how I felt about pretty much everything except for Brian and cake, and perfectly encapsulated my thoughts about ‘The Case of the Missing Ladder’. Then, as I scrolled down, I stopped smiling because this was all it consisted of: It’s three a.m.

and the night and the city belong to Leah Rebecca Overton. She prefers to run when the world is sleeping; thinks of the city’s shadowy alleyways as her playground.

First published by HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2026 Copyright © Sarah Lotz 2026 Cover design by Ellie Game/HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd Cover photographs: Shutterstock.com Sarah Lotz asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work. A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library. This novel is entirely a work of fiction.

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• File Extension: .pdf
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• Title: –
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• ISBN: 9780008464059, 9780008464073
• Pages: 289
• Language: English (en)

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