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ONE MORE THAN US

ONE MORE THAN US by ALBERT JOHN – ebook cover

Eleven people go down. The board at the bottom of the shaft says eleven. The board is wrong, and it has been wrong since three days before any of them...

About this ebook

ONE MORE THAN US by ALBERT JOHN is available in the Ebokio digital catalog as an EPUB ebook.

Price: £9.90. Language: English. Categories: Fiction & Literature.

Eleven people go down. The board at the bottom of the shaft says eleven. The board is wrong, and it has been wrong since three days before any of them arrived.

Six hundred and fifty-five feet under a Kansas winter, in forty-four miles of rooms cut out of solid rock salt, a federal court has ordered one last retrieval.

Nine hundred and forty-one boxes of paper sit in a chain-link vault — the only copies that were never digitised, the only place the original numbers still exist. In nine days the pumps stop, the shafts are capped, and the ground water is allowed to take all of it.

Dorothea Unruh is not there for the paper. She is the ground-control engineer, and her job is to listen to the rock: fourteen geophones grouted into the pillars, and a woman who can tell you where a sound was born to within four metres of solid dark.

Two years ago she read her instruments, said the word *sure* out loud to a man on a telephone at one in the morning, and a mine evacuated in forty minutes. The ground held. A shuttle-car operator did not. She has not raised her voice since.

Then the imaging technician dies under a fall of rock in a roadway he had no reason to enter — and Thea's array records the sound of his lamp hitting the floor forty-one minutes before the ground came down. She says nothing. That is who she is now.

By the fourth day the hoist is dead, an ice storm has taken the county's power and the only road out, and mine rescue is a hundred and ten miles away and cannot move.

By the sixth it is obvious to everybody that the dead are not unlucky — and Thea can prove something worse and far less useful than a name: at the second each of them died, every living person in that mine was somewhere else. Which means she is wrong again.

Which means she should have stayed quiet. Which is exactly what she is told. She is not wrong. She has simply been counting the same eleven people everybody counts, on a board that counts brass and has never once counted a human being. And the murders were never aimed at people.

They are aimed at hours — and the man spending them does not need anybody else to die. He only needs the water to finish first, because a mine that floods on a court's own timetable destroys nine hundred and forty-one boxes and leaves nobody guilty of anything at all.

ONE MORE THAN US is a closed-circle thriller in the tradition of the greatest mystery ever written, built inside a real and extraordinary place readers have never been: a working deep-storage archive in a salt mine, where the temperature has not changed since 1921, nothing rots, nothing decays, and every mistake anybody has ever made is still perfectly legible on the wall.

Everything you need to solve it is on the fourth page. You will not see it. Almost nobody does — and when you go back and find it, please tell somebody. Leave a review, and say only this: count the hooks, not the tags.

Book details

Details: 218 pages, about 60,809 words, published by ALBERT JOHN, publication date 22 August 2026.

Estimated reading time: about 4 hours.

Format, language, and reading

ONE MORE THAN US 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.

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