Unrecorded Night

In the Hollywood Hills, a celebrated director records the silence between his lover's words.Elias Thorne is sixty-three, fraudulent, and revered. For thirty years he has made films no one understands and recordings no one is permitted to hear. His method is the same with every woman he chooses: isolate her, strip her down, make her say the line until she forgets what it meant. Then use it for something else.Gemma Moore is twenty-six, Australian, and out of time. Her visa expired fifteen months ago. Her mother has not heard from her in six weeks. She is the woman currently in the house.When a detective named Ruiz starts asking questions about a missing actress from 2003, the recordings in Elias's studio begin to misbehave. Files he deleted reappear in his own handwriting. A lounge piano plays beneath rooms he has never set foot in. A woman he is certain is in the kitchen turns out not to be. And somewhere in the hours he cannot account for, a sound has been captured that he has spent a long time not playing back.Across town, his estranged wife Vivian opens a storage unit she has not entered in nine years, and finds that the pattern is older than her marriage.Unrecorded Night is a noir about the men who mistake cruelty for art, the women who survive them, and the women who do not. It is a novel about voices — the ones taken, the ones kept, and the one that goes on singing in a closed room long after anyone is left to listen.