First published 2025
Sue and Mal Eastwood run The Case is Altered, a rural pub that was barely surviving until they launched a weekly trivia night. The game brought in regulars, built a community, and kept the lights on. Then a body turns up in the nearby river, and a new team walks through the door. They ace every category, every round, every week, and nobody knows who they are or why they showed up now. Sue and Mal are rattled for reasons that go beyond a winning streak. Before they took over this pub, they were part of a secret police operation that forced them out of their previous lives. Whatever they left behind has followed them here. The story arrives in fragments: quiz categories, text messages, emails, the scraps people leave behind when things go wrong. Five years later, the pub sits empty and derelict. Sue and Mal's nephew Dominic is piecing the whole thing together for a documentary. He wants to know what happened. So does the reader. The mystery builds from small details into something much larger, and the question at the center of it all turns out to have real consequences.
Genres: mystery, crime, contemporary, thriller
Vibes: atmospheric, dark, mysterious, suspenseful, thought-provoking
Tropes: non-linear-storytelling, past-catches-up, secrets-revealed, unreliable-narrator
Setting: The Case is Altered, rural pub
Period: contemporary, five-years-later
448 pages · Hardcover · Atria Books
Content warnings: death, murder