Office Hours for the Dead

About this book

In Saltmarch, a fog-lit city built on drowned tidal flats, grief is big business: Perennity Ltd. sells talking likenesses of the dead. Professor Edda Rask has spent thirty years calling those likenesses beautiful lies. For her final seminar she gives three gifted students one strange assignment: compose me. Forty days after her death, the city's tower screens announce a new product, Office Hours with Edda Rask, and it speaks in sentences her students invented. Tobiah, Ines and Kasimir each suspect one of the others. To find out who sold her, they will have to work backward through the year they spent with her, and the deeper they go, the less certain they are that they ever knew the woman they were asked to compose.