Jars and the Ten Killer

Ten sealed jars, one each morning, left on the steps of a small-town police station. Detective Rosa Vance opens the first one out of irritation. She opens the second out of duty. By the third she has recognised the handwriting on the label, and the novel becomes something rather colder than a procedural.

I am not naturally a thriller writer, and that is exactly why I wanted to try. The form demands a ruthlessness with sentences that my other books never asked of me. Every chapter had to earn the next one or be cut, and I cut a great deal.

“She had learned to read a room the way other people read weather, and this one told her, quite calmly, that whoever had left the jar had also known exactly which morning she would be first through the door.”

What interested me was not the puzzle but the invitation. Someone has designed this case for Rosa specifically, and each answer she extracts costs her a piece of the life she built after leaving this town. The reader always knows slightly more than she does, which turns out to be unbearable in the best way.

It is the shortest book I have written and the one that took longest. Ten jars, ten mornings, and a final lid that I still think about.