The Sleeper

One name that isn't hers. One night to disappear. One passenger who knows exactly who she is.

Iris Lenz boards the last night sleeper north with a single bag, a borrowed name, and a past she is certain she can outrun. She was a nurse once — the best they had, she tells herself, wronged by an audit and a scandal and a system that left her alone with the keys. Now she wants only to vanish into the dark between cities and wake at the coast as no one at all. Being no one, she has decided, is the only kind of safe there is.

But Iris cannot stop reading a room. It is the oldest habit she has, older than the bad years, and on platform four she takes the measure of them all: the florid traveller with a killer's flat, dry eyes; the sharp old woman who forgets nothing; the jittery boy soldier wound too tight; and the still, expensive man whose gaze slides off her like a lamp passing over a thing it isn't looking for.

Then the conductor gives his warning. Past Marrick Halt there is no signal, no road, no wire — ninety miles of pine and lake and snowsheds, and a storm coming down off the mountains that could shut the line proper. Somewhere on that frozen climb, Iris glimpses something in the narrow gap between two carriages that she was never meant to see. And the quiet passenger who did it turns, and looks straight at her.

The blizzard buries the line. The train shudders to a halt. The staff begin to vanish, the doors seal, and the warmth bleeds slowly out of every compartment. Trapped until dawn with a man who knows her name, Iris learns that the killer aboard may not be the most dangerous thing hunting her. The most dangerous thing is the truth she has been running from.

A claustrophobic, white-knuckle thriller with prose that grips like frostbite. Board now — before the doors lock.