The Quietest Voice in the Room

I have always been more frightened by a calm voice than a raised one. A man who shouts tells you where he stands. A man who speaks softly, politely, and takes his time with every word makes you lean in. And once you lean in, you have already given him something.

That was the seed of The Unmissed.

The question that wouldn't leave

Ghostwriters fascinate me. Their whole job is disappearing. They sit across from a stranger, listen for weeks, and then write in that stranger's voice so well that readers never suspect anyone else was in the room.

So I kept asking myself: what happens when the stranger is a killer? And what happens when the ghostwriter is good enough that it works?

To write a man convincingly, you have to think the way he thinks. You learn his rhythms, his small courtesies, the order in which he arranges a thought. For a few hours a day, you become him. Most of the time you set that voice aside when you close the laptop. What if, one day, it won't let go of you?

That is Elliot Marsh. He is very, very good at his job, and that is exactly his problem.

Peter Lund, the monster who says please

When I started building Peter, I knew I wanted to stay far away from the genius serial killer who quotes poetry and plays mind games from his cell. That man is fun on screen, but he is comfortable. He is so obviously a monster that we never fear becoming him.

Peter is mild. He is patient. He thanks the guards. He has a tidy, orderly mind, and he talks about the worst things he has done the way someone else might describe repotting a plant. He was caught long ago, he confessed, and the state has set a date. There is no question about whether he is guilty.

What frightens me about Peter is how reasonable he sounds. He makes you nod along. I wanted readers to finish one of his passages, realize they had enjoyed it, the shape of the sentence, the calm logic, and then remember what the sentence was about. That sick little jolt is the real horror of this book. It lives in your own reaction far more than in any wound on the page.

The people no one came looking for

The title comes from Peter's victims. He chose people no one would look for: runaways, drifters, the ones whose absence closes over like water over a dropped stone.

I couldn't stop thinking about that. Every day, quietly, a society decides who is worth searching for. Most of us never notice the decision being made. Peter noticed. He built a life around it.

Elliot begins to call them the unmissed, and the longer he listens, the more he wants their names back. Somewhere, a mother still sets a place at the table. To learn who she is waiting for, Elliot has to keep walking back into that cold room, and every session costs him a little more of himself.

The book is about Peter, and it is about Elliot, but at its heart it belongs to those people. I wanted them to be missed at last, by someone. I hope by you.

A page of mine for a page of yours

Peter gives nothing away for free. Early on, he names his price: a page of his life for a page of Elliot's. It sounds like a fair trade, almost intimate. It is the most dangerous sentence in the book.

I gave myself one rule for the sessions: nothing happens in that room that couldn't happen in a real prison. Two men, a steel table, a guard by the door. The dread had to come from proximity, from listening too long to the wrong voice. And then I made sure the danger didn't stay inside the room. A man on death row should not be able to reach the outside world. Elliot learns, slowly, that Peter can.

Why Elliot tells it himself

The Unmissed is told in Elliot's own voice, in the first person, and that choice mattered more than any other. I wanted you inside the head of a man who is learning to sound like a killer, so you could hear the moment his voice begins to slip, maybe before he does. Lines start turning up on his legal pad that he doesn't remember writing. In his own hand.

The first of The Death Row Sessions

The Unmissed is a complete story, and it is also Book One of The Death Row Sessions. Each book puts Elliot across the table from a different condemned voice, and each one leaves a mark. Under the whole series runs a question I still can't answer comfortably: can a man spend his life inhabiting monsters without becoming a little bit of one?

Book One is the first crack.

The Unmissed is available for pre-order now and releases soon. If you read it, I would love to hear the moment it got under your skin. And when you turn the last page and notice how calm you feel, sit with that for a minute.

That calm is the part that stays.