Signs of Death: A Dr Giselle Norwood Forensic Thriller

Every Friday, the chair across from her at Giuliano’s belongs to her dead husband. Tonight a stranger is sitting in it — and he’s holding a photograph she has never seen.

Dr. Giselle Norwood spends her workdays listening to what dead bodies tell, and her widowhood listening for a husband who no longer can. The man in Charlie’s chair is Bobby Kaminski, a fast-talking defense attorney holding a Polaroid of Charlie at summer camp with a boy who was wrongfully convicted and killed in prison. The district attorney who put him there is one verdict away from becoming Wisconsin’s Attorney General — and his next conviction is the man Kaminski is now defending.

The defendant is repugnant, the prosecution’s theory is wrong, and the proof is on a page the DA quietly removed from discovery. To expose him, Giselle will have to take the stand for a man she despises and tell the truth about how a woman with anemia died eating the pages of her own paperback books.

She can keep her head down and let a corrupt prosecutor write himself a ticket to higher office, or she can settle an old account for a boy in a Polaroid her husband never lived to show her. Justice, she has always believed, is the unfaltering embracing of truth — but in a courtroom built on a missing page, what does a widow owe to the dead?