The Collector

Elliot Marsh has forty-two days to write the memoir of Gideon Roe, a mild, meticulous estate-clearance man on death row for a murder everyone believes is closed. Roe has already chosen Elliot to witness his execution.

At first, Roe seems disappointingly ordinary. Then Elliot learns what Roe left in a storage unit: two hundred cartons labeled with strangers’ surnames and towns. For decades, Roe has archived other killers’ crimes, just to be the only person who knows where the truth went.

Behind the labels, families still wait. One mother has renewed her missing daughter’s library card for nineteen years, since the girl went out in a green jacket, her name inked in the collar. For years, a vanished boy’s father walked the same three miles of highway shoulder every Sunday.

Now Elliot is trapped. If he digs into the cartons, Roe will sense it within two sessions, and the memoir dies unfinished. If he just writes the book, the county sells the cartons by the cubic yard, answers and all. Roe’s question from their first session stays with Elliot.