She gives the nameless dead their names. This one already had hers. Dr. Nora Vale is the best forensic genetic genealogist alive. Police hand her the cases no one can close
- the unidentified, the drawer-cold, the John Does nobody came looking for. From a few strands of DNA
she rebuilds a family tree, node by node, until a body stops being evidence and becomes somebody's son.
A man comes out of a condemned cold-storage warehouse on the frozen lakefront. Hard-frozen. Deliberately
preserved. No name, no history, no one reporting him gone. Just another Doe. Nora runs the sample the
way she always does.
The tree returns a match she can't explain. A half-sibling - close, certain, seventeen hundred
centimorgans of shared blood. Half-siblings share one parent. And the records-linkage puts a name on the
screen beside an obituary thirty-two years old.
Her father. The man who drowned when she was eight. The body they never recovered. The empty grave she
grew up beside - the grave that made her the woman who names the dead.
The stranger in the freezer is her brother. Which means the death she has believed her whole life
doesn't add up - and someone made sure that body stayed frozen exactly long enough. The tool Nora trusts
most just handed her a truth that people with everything to lose have spent decades keeping buried. She
can log the Doe as unknown and walk away breathing. Or she can pull the thread and detonate her own
family, her own science, and her own name.
She gives the dead their names for a living.
This time, the name is hers.
Cold Storage launches the Nora Vale series - a relentless, ice-cold crime thriller for readers who like
their conspiracies grounded and their science exact. Short chapters. Hard hooks. The most dangerous
secret in the country, hidden in the one place no one thinks to look: your own blood.
