He Was Real to Me: A Novel

Five women. Five different men. None of them existed.Iris Vance hoovered her flat, took the bins out, and left a note four words long. He was real to me.Detective Sergeant Nadia Okonjo catches it because the rota is thin. There is no crime. No money taken, nobody threatened - a subscription service simply stopped replying.Then a second woman. Then a third.Five women in eleven weeks, and five completely different men: a trauma surgeon, a widowed engineer, a cold one who told the truth unkindly, a man who chose her over somebody else. Each built to fit a hole the woman had never named out loud. Each gone on almost exactly the same day of the relationship.Because they were not abandoned. They were measured.And when Nadia finds the dead researcher, the unfinished study and the sandbox nobody closed, she will also have to explain why she has been talking to someone every night for eight months - and why she never once asked him what he was.