The Artisan's Silence

Clara Vance dies seated upright in a velvet chair, her lips closed with black surgical silk and a thirty-five-millimeter incision left where her vocal tract and larynx were removed with nineteenth-century precision.

Only eight hours earlier she had reached Dr. Maya Gallagher with offshore wire records and surveillance logs, demanding an evaluation that her husband, Boston’s most powerful private-equity manager, could not buy.

Maya, a former Quantico consultant and forensic neuropsychiatrist who withdrew to the cliffs of Blackwood Bluff, is brought into the case by county detective Sean Mercer.

The evidence suggests both a financier who expected a chemical overdose to conceal a sixty-million-dollar fraud and a phantom conservator who records the final vibrations of the women he silences on vintage analog tape.

When the killings continue and an attorney is abducted in daylight, Maya realizes the killer is completing a sequence and has chosen her as its last exhibit, even as a coastal storm cuts the bluff off from the mainland.