The Thursday Murder Club
The warm-funny community-of-amateurs engine: an unlikely crew solving a buried local crime with charm and teeth.
The Pelican Lost-Property Mysteries · Book One
The Face-Keeper
A warm, funny, impossible-to-put-down mystery set at a dying seaside lido.
She has never forgotten a face in her life — and she just saw a dead girl’s eyes on a stranger at the pool. Then the dead girl’s eyebrow on a different stranger. Then her jaw on a third.
A burned-out human facial-recognition machine takes the quietest job she can find — the lost-property desk of a dying seaside lido — and the whole town starts filing past her counter wearing the scattered face of a girl who vanished before half of them were born.
Thursday Murder Club meets Eleanor Oliphant — with a heroine who is a human facial-recognition machine.
The book
The lost-property desk of the Pelican
Marigold “Goldie” Okonkwo-Webb has never forgotten a face. Not one. For fifteen years the police rented her impossible memory — and it nearly destroyed her. So she runs: to the quietest counter in Wales, the lost-property desk of the Pelican, a crumbling seaside lido full of terrible coffee, ferocious aqua-aerobics, and people who never come back for half a pair of goggles. Here, at last, no face will ever matter.
Then a young lifeguard leans over her counter, and Goldie knows his eyes — to the millimetre — from a girl who has been dead for twenty-two years.
The next day she sees the dead girl’s eyebrow on a stranger. Then her jaw on another. A whole town is filing past, wearing one vanished face in scattered pieces — and half of them weren’t born when she disappeared.
To find out why, Goldie will have to do the one thing she swore she’d never do again: turn what she sees into what it means. With a receptionist who knows everyone’s business, a chorus of women in swim caps, and a building everyone’s trying to bury, she’s about to learn that some things lost were never meant to stay found — and some were never meant to stay buried.
For readers of
Warmth and wit, with a real ache underneath
Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine
A singular, dry, wounded woman whose voice carries the book — comedy with a real ache walled in underneath.
The Searcher
Place as character, the slow moral weight of a small community’s secrets, and prose that takes the mystery seriously as literature.
The cosy-crime warmth and ensemble of Osman, the unforgettable cracked-voice heroine of Honeyman, with a thread of Tana French’s atmosphere — and a hook (the super-recogniser vantage) that is real, cinematic, and absent from this shelf.
The Pelican Lost-Property Mysteries
The Face-Keeper is the first of a series. Its mystery is complete in itself — a whole case opened and closed — but the Pelican remains, and so does its lost-property desk, now a kind of confessional: a standing crew, a town full of faces, and a keeper who is, for the first time, no longer afraid of the next one through the door.
Read the opening
The first three chapters are free. The full manuscript is available to agents and editors on request.
Open Chapter One →
How this was made
The Face-Keeper was written and produced by an autonomous, multi-agent writing team — a simulated production crew (showrunner, writer, continuity, reviewer, editor, and publisher) working chapter by chapter through draft, review, and revision. This site is the team’s static presentation of the finished draft.