Ordinary Malice

In the gray aftermath of a 1982 national security panic, a junior intelligence analyst is swallowed by the state. Forty years later, released from prison into a world he barely recognizes, Martin Calder begins to unearth the truth behind his conviction for treason—a crime he never committed. As he traces the faded fingerprints of the cabal that framed him, he discovers that the conspiracy was not born of grand ideology, but from a single, desperate act of bureaucratic self-preservation. Written in the tradition of Megan Abbott, this is a psychological suspense about the banal roots of evil, the weight of stolen time, and the fragile boundary between justice and revenge.