Seventeen Hours

Two passengers are dead. The doors are sealed. And the detective is wrong about everything.

Maggie Ashford-Finch is not looking for trouble. She's a retired insurance-fraud investigator flying London to Sydney to meet the grandchild she's never held - and to face the daughter she hasn't spoken to in four years. All she wants is seventeen hours of peace, a decent glass of wine, and the courage to say the things she's spent a lifetime avoiding.

She doesn't get any of it.

When a loud, abrasive property developer is found dead in his First class seat during a patch of severe turbulence, the cabin crew turns to Maggie - the only person on board with three decades of investigative experience. There's no diversion. No backup. No outside help. Just 243 passengers sealed inside an aluminium tube at 38,000 feet, and a killer who is still sitting among them.

Maggie does what she's always done: she looks for the pattern. She interviews passengers row by row. She maps timelines, chases alibis, and builds a theory that gets sharper with every conversation. The evidence points somewhere. The motive makes sense. The shape of the case is starting to click.

Then a second body is discovered - a distinguished surgeon, strangled in the hidden crew rest compartment above the cabin ceiling - and the shape Maggie has been building shatters.

Two victims. No connection between them. A cabin full of passengers who are all hiding something - a hedge-fund analyst who won't explain what she's typing, a nervous young man who's been to the lavatory eleven times, a rival developer with an overheard phone call that sounds like a threat, a recent widow who shared the dead man's last kind conversation. Every thread Maggie pulls seems to lead deeper into a conspiracy she can't quite see.

But what if there is no conspiracy? What if the reason nothing connects is because nothing was ever supposed to?

With hours until landing and the cabin losing faith in her, Maggie faces the hardest thing an investigator can do: abandon the theory she's sure is right - and accept that the truth might have a shape she's never seen before.

Set entirely aboard a single ultra-long-haul flight, Seventeen Hours is a fair-play murder mystery in the tradition of clever, voice-driven whodunits - a locked-room puzzle with a modern twist, a cast of suspects you'll love and mistrust in equal measure, and a detective whose warmth, wit, and merciless eye will keep you turning pages long after the cabin lights go down.

For readers who love The Thursday Murder Club, Knives Out, and The 7½ Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle.