Every Contact Leaves a Trace

'If you were to ask me to tell you about my wife, I would have to warn you at the outset that I don't know a great deal about her. Or at least, not as much as I thought I did ...' Alex is a solitary London lawyer who is deeply in love with his beautiful wife, Rachel. When Rachel is brutally murdered one Midsummer Night in Oxford, all of his happiness vanishes. Shrouded in shock and grief, he returns to Oxford that winter and begins to try to piece together the mystery surrounding Rachel’s death, discovering in her wake a tangled web of sex and jealousy, of would-be lovers and spiteful friends, of blackmail, and of revenge.

About the Author :
I was born in 1973, in Chingola, Zambia. My childhood was spent there and in the UK (in Cornwall, and in Surrey, Worcestershire and Kent), the US (in Colorado, and Nevada) and Jakarta, Indonesia. My father was a mining engineer, and my mother was a teacher. They took my brothers and me with them wherever they travelled, until, later on, we went to English boarding schools and flew home for the holidays. I studied English at Worcester College, Oxford, where I was a choral scholar. During my degree I worked as a musician, a waitress, a barista, a film extra, and in a chrysanthemum factory. I went to law school, then qualified as a commercial lawyer with Clifford Chance LLP. At the firm’s London office, I worked in insurance litigation, corporate finance and pensions. In their Singapore office, I bought and sold aeroplanes and gas power projects, and assisted with the litigation coming out of the collapse of Barings Bank. At around that time, I read an interview with Ian McEwan. ‘If you want to be a writer,’ he said, ‘get a job which requires you to write every day.’ Taking his advice, I became a reporter for the Incorporated Council of Law Reporting for England and Wales (the ICLR), covering cases from the High Court and the Court of Appeal. For several years, I worked in and around the Royal Courts of Justice, watching stories unfold, and writing them up for publication in the Law Reports and the Times Law Reports. In my late-thirties, when my short fiction was accepted by Stand and The Warwick Review, I wrote my first novel, Every Contact Leaves A Trace. The novel was published in the UK in 2012, and later in the US and in translation. In 2013 it was longlisted for the Authors’ Club Best First Novel Award. My new novel, Silver & Salt, will be published in April, 2017. I live in London, where I’m writing my next two novels, and am on the ICLR’s books as a freelance reporter. I work as a creative writing mentor for new writers (giving a tailored 6-month course as a first novel progresses, or my own ‘MOT’ of a completed manuscript, with notes and edits) and run creative writing workshops for small groups. I am a reader and judge for the Society of Authors and the Royal Society of Literature, and have been selected to join the Royal Literary Fund Fellowship Scheme. Mark Meadows is a British actor with extensive theatre, film and TV credits. He is a frequent contributor to plays, musicals, narrations and readings for BBC Radio 3 and Radio 4. Mark has narrated around 80 audiobook titles and was a nominee for the 2013 Audible Narrator of the Year award. He also provided the voice of the ship’s computer in Ridley Scott’s Prometheus.

Review :
'A powerful meditation on grief, love and the nature of uncertainty.' 'An exquisite, creepy and unexpectedly sexy murder mystery.' 'In addition to creating a cleverly calibrated and creepy murder mystery, Dymott has also fashioned a neatly tailored exploration of the desperate psychology of loss ... This is a cunning, sharp first novel that revels in keeping one in the dark.'