The books

Officially, Wynn Okafor cleans up after the dead: the council's lists, the funeral home's, the rooms nobody else will go into. Unofficially, she can feel the one thing a life left unfinished, pulling at her like a compass needle. Finishing it costs her something every time, and she never gets to choose what. Usually a memory. Too often, one of the few she has left of her brother.

Gil Amery has been found in the chair by his window. The flat is spotless, the bed turned down, and beside the kettle stand two cups: his, and a second one, rinsed and set ready for someone expected at eight o'clock.

The police have their version. The cup has another. It points to a woman who doesn't know she is owed anything, a family with reasons to want the story tidy, and DC Marla Reyes, who is starting to notice that Wynn is always standing where the truth turns out to be. And into all of it walks a stranger in a very good coat, who knows exactly what Wynn can do and has an offer she should not want to hear.

One Thing Undone is the first of The Quiet Uncanny Mysteries: British crime with a quiet, uncanny edge, for readers who like grief in their mysteries and their ghosts kept firmly offstage.

Nancy Ferrand was seventy-four. She fell down the three steps in her own back hall carrying a mug of tea. The door was on the latch, nothing was taken, and the file says accidental fall. The file is right.

But the thing Nancy left undone is not a message or a task. It is a promise, forty years old, and it is still holding. Keep it, and someone living goes on paying for it. Break it, and Wynn Okafor betrays the one thing a dead woman asked of anybody. Nobody can deliver a promise. So what do you do with one?

Across town, another body comes in with nothing undone at all: a room scraped clean, as if something had been taken before it could be finished. In nine years Wynn has never seen that. The man in the good coat has, and he is delighted to explain that he didn't choose the target. Somebody paid.

And this time, the price of finishing won't be a memory.

A Promise, Not a Clue is the second of The Quiet Uncanny Mysteries. It can be read on its own, but is best read after One Thing Undone.

Ray Cutter and Wilf Ames die at opposite ends of Cardenn. Strangers, the town swears: two old men who never spoke in fifty years.

Wynn Okafor cleans both rooms, and in each she finds half of the same undone thing: one unfinished act split down the middle, which will only read when the two halves are put together. Whatever joined these men happened long ago, on the night of the flood in 1974, when a third boy went down towards the river and did not come home.

The town has had half a century to settle on its story. A mother has had half a century without an answer. And then a dying woman Wynn has never met spends her last hour trying to reach her, with a message about Wynn's brother.

Two of a Kind is the third of The Quiet Uncanny Mysteries. Best read in order.

It is the last week of December. Marcus Leask has been found dead in a café car park on the coast road, sudden and alone. His seven-year-old son, Toby, is not with him.

Toby is somewhere safe. His father made sure of that, and then died before he could tell anyone where. Every search ends in the same place. The only thing that knows the way is the one thing Marcus left undone, and no warrant anywhere can cite it.

DC Marla Reyes has watched Wynn Okafor be right about things she had no business knowing. Now, with a child out in the winter and the days running down, Reyes has to decide whether to write the impossible down, under her own name, on the record.

It will cost her. It will cost Wynn more. And somewhere in town, a man in a very good coat is watching the price of everything go up.

On the Record is the fourth of The Quiet Uncanny Mysteries. Best read in order.

Cardenn has been waiting a long time for someone to say what is wrong with it. This spring it may have to.

A hearing is set. A sealed room at the old chapel is about to be opened. And a trade with a man in a very good coat, who has never once lied to Wynn Okafor, is about to fall due.

Wynn has spent a decade finishing other people's unfinished business, one lost memory at a time. She keeps a drawer of what remains, and a short list of what she will not spend.

The Fourth Room is the fifth and last of The Quiet Uncanny Mysteries. Best read in order.