THE PROPERTY OF STRANGERS
Four people nobody looks at are about to solve a murder the city forgot on purpose. For thirty-one years, Margo Delisle has run the lost and found beneath...
About this ebook
THE PROPERTY OF STRANGERS by ALBERT JOHN is available in the Ebokio digital catalog as an EPUB ebook.
Price: £9.90. Language: English. Categories: Fiction & Literature.
Four people nobody looks at are about to solve a murder the city forgot on purpose.
For thirty-one years, Margo Delisle has run the lost and found beneath Rosewater Avenue station — a flooded sub-basement holding two hundred and ten thousand things that strangers left behind and never came back for.
She has a counter clerk who can hear a lie about an umbrella from nine feet away, a handler who can walk the deep shelves in the dark, and a seventy-four-year-old sweeper who remembers the city when it had a hundred thousand more people in it.
Between them they are extremely good at something nobody watches. Then the order arrives. The office closes on the last day of December, and the law demands one final act first: every unclaimed article must be listed, in public, before it can be destroyed.
It is meant to be the dullest work in Cassaway. It becomes the most dangerous — because one line of that inventory belongs to the autumn of 1978, when a nineteen-year-old coin-room clerk walked down to the platform with a camera in her bag and was never seen again.
When the retired records clerk who spots the discrepancy dies on those same stairs within the week, the fall is ruled an accident and nobody who matters disagrees.
So four people with no authority, no budget and eleven weeks left on their contracts start doing the only thing they have ever been good at. They go through the boxes. One at a time. In order.
And they write down what they find — while the man who signed their closure order quietly has the shelves emptied around them.
THE PROPERTY OF STRANGERS is a mystery about the people a city keeps in its basement, about the difference between a record and a memory, and about what it costs, at sixty-one, to say out loud that you are not finished.
It is warm, it is fair — every clue is on the page — and it will make you think about the last thing you lost, and about who was on the other side of the counter when you went looking for it. Some things are worth going back for.
Turn the first page, and when you reach the last one, tell another reader what you found down there.
Book details
Details: 333 pages, about 92,978 words, published by ALBERT JOHN, publication date 23 August 2026.
Estimated reading time: about 6 hours.
Format, language, and reading
THE PROPERTY OF STRANGERS is delivered as an EPUB ebook in English, and reads on phone, tablet, or computer through the Ebokio web reader with no app to install and no DRM.
Buyers can use Ebokio reading tools where supported, including adjustable themes and fonts, AI read aloud and text to speech, summaries, and Ask This Book for eligible owned titles.
Related ebooks
- Monsons' Folly by Bradley McConnachie
- The Hunger of the Grendels by Bradley McConnachie
- The Ice That Remembered by Bradley McConnachie
- The Return of Deidre Tischler by Bradley McConnachie
- The Voice Beneath the Yellowwoods by Bradley McConnachie
- Die Buchhandlung am Ende des Deichs by Alexander wulf
More by ALBERT JOHN
- THE BLANK ON THE MAP by ALBERT JOHN
- THE WEIGHT OF QUIET THINGS by ALBERT JOHN
- ONE MORE THAN US by ALBERT JOHN
- THE THIRTY-FIRST HOUSE by ALBERT JOHN
EBOKIO LTD · Registered in England and Wales · Company No. 17308940 · Registered office: 128 City Road, London EC1V 2NX, United Kingdom