First published 2018
Paul Davis is not sleeping well. Eight months ago he drove down Post Road in Milford, Connecticut, and stumbled onto a murder scene. Two women had been forced to type personal apologies before his colleague, the so-called Apology Killer, cut their throats. Paul survived the encounter, barely. Now his wife Charlotte has given him an antique Underwood typewriter, and late at night he hears it clicking downstairs. Charlotte hears nothing. His therapist has plenty of theories. Paul has been struggling with damaged nerves and a fractured short-term memory since the trauma, so maybe the sounds are his mind misfiring. To settle it, he rolls a sheet of paper into the machine before bed. In the morning he finds a sentence typed on the page: the dead women say they typed their apologies just as the killer asked, and he murdered them anyway. Paul cannot explain the note. He cannot ignore it either. The question eating at him is whether the women he failed to save are somehow reaching out, and whether listening to them will protect him or finish destroying what is left of his grip on reality.
Genres: mystery, horror, adult-fiction, thriller
Vibes: atmospheric, dark, psychological, suspenseful, unsettling
Tropes: gaslighting, haunted-object, psychological-breakdown, unreliable-narrator
Setting: Milford, Connecticut, Post Road
Period: 21st-century, contemporary
368 pages · Paperback · Doubleday Canada
Content warnings: death, mental-illness, murder