The Ghost of Russia and Ukraine

Some voices are never supposed to return. Forensic analyst Mara Volkov has spent sixteen years doing one thing better than anyone alive: proving that a voice is a lie. Courtrooms call her when the dead seem to speak. She has never once been wrong. Then a cassette tape arrives at her door - addressed in her dead grandmother's handwriting, to a granddaughter she never met. Days later, a broadcast tears through Moscow's emergency airwaves in the voice of a colonel dead for years, naming names, detonating lives. Then Kyiv. Then Crimea. Then Kaliningrad. Four cities, one impossible voice, and a signature buried in the static that only Mara can hear - because she's heard it before, on a tape recorder that once belonged to her father. The father who vanished in a fire twenty-six years ago. The father everyone told her was dead. He isn't. And what he's built in the years since - an archive of stolen voices, a machine that can resurrect anyone who ever spoke into a microphone - is about to force Mara to choose between the only truth she's ever trusted and the only family she has left. Some ghosts don't come back to haunt you. They come back to make you listen. A gripping literary thriller for fans of psychological suspense with teeth - where the most dangerous weapon in four countries is a voice you can't stop believing.