A Secret About a Secret: A novel

by Peter Spiegelman

Overview

A hypnotic literary mystery thriller about a murder at a secluded research facility and the secrets that it exposes. • "Cyber thievery, lust, corporate espionage, and a host of deleterious secrets comprise the chords of this sweeping, riveting symphony. A bold and original thriller by a masterful storyteller.” —Elizabeth Brundage, author of The Vanishing Point


Looming high above the cliffside along a remote coastline, Ondstrand House is the headquarters of the shadowy biotech firm Ondstrand Biologic. When the body of the organization’s most gifted young scientist, Allegra Stans, is discovered in a walk-in refrigerator—her neck has been broken—Agent Myles is called in to investigate. Myles works for Standard Division, the most feared element of a vast state security apparatus, and he’s been dispatched to the brooding manor, a massive stone campus that once housed a notorious boarding school, to do what Standard Division agents do best—complete the task at hand.

As his investigation proceeds, Myles discovers that “gifted scientist” is only one thread in the complicated fabric of Allegra’s life. There are darker strands as well—of ambition, manipulation, and bitter grievance—all woven into a pattern of secrets, each presenting a reasonable motive for murder. It appears everyone has something to hide, including Allegra’s colleagues, lovers, and former lovers—even the very halls of Ondstrand House itself.

Questions continue to pile up: What interest does Standard Division, an organization best known for intelligence gathering and clandestine international operations, have in this seemingly straightforward case? Could the killing have anything to do with the sprawling estate’s sordid past? And what, exactly, is this research facility researching? Before long, another murder is discovered, and Myles finds himself an increasingly unwelcome presence in an ever more hostile landscape with few allies and fewer answers.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780307961297
Publisher:	Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Publication date:	06/07/2022
Pages:	336
Sales rank:	1,045,491
Product dimensions:	6.50(w) x 9.20(h) x 1.40(d)

About the Author

PETER SPIEGELMAN is the author of Black Maps, Death’s Little Helpers, Red Cat, Thick as Thieves, and Dr. Knox. Prior to his career as a writer, Spiegelman spent nearly twenty years in the financial services and software industries. He lives in New York City.

Read an Excerpt

CHAPTER ONE

Saturday Evening

The road was long and secret: a tunnel of trees that leaned overhead and wept like mourners in the wind. It ran beneath iron skies, past vacant fields and the lichen-­crusted stones of ragged walls. It ran past a farmhouse, dark and empty, and through a stone village with few lit windows and no signs that named it. It ran on then towards the coast, and even in the hermetic car I smelled salt and rotting seaweed.

My driver had excellent posture, a glossy brown ponytail, and perfect silence. I trusted that she knew our destination—what else could I do?—though she had shared nothing about it with me, instead maintaining a near-­statuary stillness as she drove. Nor had I any idea of why I’d been dispatched. To examine, to investigate, to discover, to take a confession, to punish, or simply to bear witness? I was authorized to do all of these, though I wondered lately about my qualifications for any of them. If nostalgia was called for perhaps, or distraction, equivocation, worry, longing, or bone weariness, then I might be useful. But in all these years, my masters had never sought such things from me, and I didn’t think this Saturday in March would be the first time.

The rear seat was deep and enveloping, the doors were distant, and the windows were tinted. Between the tidal sway of the car’s suspension and the thrum of pavement rolling away, I lapsed into a sort of fugue. It was not quite sleep, yet not quite dreamless—an unmooring, a drifting, and as I drifted, I crossed a frontier. There was no razor wire or striped barricade, no skeptical guards or surly dogs, no customs shed for stammered declarations, but a border nonetheless. When I came around, on the far side, it was to another world.

To an uncertain season, neither winter nor spring, under dark, colliding skies—the clouds swollen and malign, obedient to no known physics. To a fading sun pinned wrong in the heavens, casting shadows too long, too dark, and irreconcilable with their antecedent objects. To birds hurtling wildly—careening, tumbling, shedding feathers like confetti, as if they’d been shot from a circus cannon. It was as if the planet had been knocked from its axis, jarred fifteen degrees from true—and not just the planet.

The city, so many miles behind me, seemed even more distant now—a dying ember in my memory. My life there, even my Saturday morning, seemed suddenly remote and abstract—barely a pantomime. The people on my street and in the metro, in the shops and cafés, were like figures in an ancient film—silent, stiff-­limbed silhouettes, thinner than smoke. The grocer, the sour man at the newsstand, my garrulous neighbor—it seemed any breeze could take them all into this alien sky. I might’ve been away from the city for minutes or hours or for a year or more—I had no idea, or any notion of what I’d find when I returned. If I returned. I shuddered and rubbed my eyes, but the feelings of dislocation, strangeness, and dread persisted. It was almost dark when we arrived.

The great house was behind stone pillars and iron gates, down a brick drive bordered with pollarded trees and boxwoods still in burlap, and with brown lawns rolling away. The drive ran for half a mile and rose steeply at the end, to where the house loomed above the sea.

It was an ancient pile of ginger-­colored stone, with a massive central section and two long wings that reached towards me. Scrolled and fluted stonework framed dark windows, and stone birds brooded beneath the eaves of a copper roof. The wings embraced a brick forecourt with a fountain in the middle, in gray stone that had fared poorly in the salt air. Its figures were blurred and blunted, and in the failing light I couldn’t tell if the squat shapes spouting water were fish or frogs or demons, or if the male form they aimed at was bearing the world or heaving against a boulder. In either case, a thankless job.

The car swept around the court and stopped beneath a columned porte cochere. The driver remained still and mute behind the wheel but unlocked the rear doors. I’d barely wrestled my bag and briefcase to the bricks when she drove off again. The evening air was cold and briny, and a swirling wind raised funnels of stone dust and dry leaves. Beneath the lapping of the fountain and the sound of the receding car I could hear the heavy, restless shift of the sea.

Lights came on in the porte cochere, and one of the massive double doors swung back. A young woman stood there, small in the yawning doorway. She was slender and pale, in black boots, a gray skirt, and a black jacket with a mandarin collar. Her straight blond hair was parted in the middle and bound in a braid that hung over her left shoulder like the business end of a riding crop. Her white hands curled into fists, her lips made a skeptical line, and her large gray eyes narrowed. She looked at me for a long time—my battered luggage, my dark suit and coat, creased from the journey, my creased face and dark hair, tangled by the wind—before she spoke.

“You’re from Security?” she asked. Her speech was precise, her voice low and controlled, as if it was perilous to give it rein.

“Yes,” I said. “The Division of Security Standards—Standard Division.”

“You have identification?” I drew ID from a breast pocket and handed her the case. She flipped it open, studied it, studied me, and flipped it shut. “Agent Myles,” she said, and returned my ID.

“ ‘Myles’ will do.”

“Why is it ‘Standard Division’? Why don’t you call it ‘Standards Division’?”

I looked at her and shrugged. “Even we cannot control how the vernacular develops.”

The woman shook her head. “We expected you earlier.”

“It’s a long drive.”

“The cafeteria is this way,” she said.

“There’s no need, I’m not hungry.”

She tilted her head at me as if I’d spoken in tongues. “The cafeteria is where we found the body,” she said, and beckoned me on.

Editorial Reviews

04/11/2022

Spiegelman (Dr. Knox) makes a rare misstep with this venture into quasi dystopian territory. Agent Myles, a member of the Standard Division, an intelligence service of an unnamed country with hints of Scandinavia and northern England, is dispatched to a secretive biotech company campus to investigate the murder of Allegra Stans, who had worked on a confidential project with government connections. Myles quickly learns of Stans’s vigorous sexual appetites over her seven-year tenure, both with colleagues and outside Ondstrand Biologic’s claustrophobic confines. The campus’s history as a boarding school with a sordid past reinforces the locked-room aspects of Myles’s investigation, which bogs down in repeated descriptions of Stans as sexually aggressive and emotionally detached. When Myles confronts the company founders with an account of Stans’s foray into corporate espionage, the school’s horrific legacy becomes an immediate, deadly threat to the investigator. Only the murky, ambiguously explained omnipotence of his own agency can save Myles as he strives to solve a crime within a crime. This falls short of this otherwise accomplished author’s best. Agent: Vicky Bijur, Vicky Bijur Literary. (June)

Publishers Weekly

"A murder mystery—stylishly penned, meteorologically moody and ever so slightly Gothic. . . . Spiegelman can mint a crisp image in a single sentence. . . . Whether the book heralds the beginning of a new series or not, it's a humdinger."
—Tom Nolan, The Wall Street Journal

"[A] refreshingly inventive take on the crime novel. From the Gothic undertones of the scandal-racked boarding school and the slick machinations of modern corporate espionage, to the Scandinoir atmosphere of the bleak coastal towns and the techno-thriller details of what exactly Ondstrand Biologic is capable of doing, this novel effectively melds various strands of detective fiction to create something fresh and original. . . . I hope this is merely the first in a series, as Myles is a tremendously engaging, intelligent hero I definitely want to read more about, and the speculative setting is ripe for further exploration." 
—Criminal Element

"Spiegelman’s magical writing invites a deeper connection both with the landscape of this unusual police procedural and with the grim sense of despair that the security force, known simply as Standard Division, can evoke through its enormous power. . . . Spiegelman’s plotting and pace are flawless, and his interludes of heightened language raise the tension. . . . A Secret About a Secret resonates with the deep melancholy and simmering resentments that classic hard-boiled detective fiction embraces, but with far more grace and beauty. There are passages that can haunt, all on their own. . . . This all adds up to the one complaint likely for this compelling novel: Somehow, it ends too soon"
—New York Journal of Books

"Peter Spiegelman has always been about intricate plotting, and [A Secret About a Secret] is no different. Only this time, he’s added another level."
—Northwest Indiana Times

"Spiegelman is a top-notch storyteller, and his latest will appeal equally to those who enjoy mainstream procedurals and to genre-blending readers who relish crime novels set in the future."
—Booklist

"In his astonishing new novel, set in an ambiguous future, Peter Spiegelman unpacks a murder at an elite research facility with an ominous history, navigating an elusive frontier of scientific innovation where intellectual property is its most coveted currency. Cyber thievery, lust, corporate espionage, and a host of deleterious secrets comprise the chords of this sweeping, riveting symphony.  A bold and original thriller by a masterful storyteller. 
—Elizabeth Brundage, author of The Vanishing Point

"In A Secret About a Secret, Peter Spiegelman has written a cool, stylish, state-of-the-art thriller that suits our moment perfectly. Fans of Scandinavian crime shows and well-crafted American mystery fiction will come away more than satisfied. Highly recommended."
—Peter Blauner, Edgar Award winner and New York Times bestselling author of The Intruder and Sunrise Highway
 
"Peter Spiegelman has an extraordinary ability to conjure vivid characters and places with a few perfectly-chosen words. In A Secret About a Secret, he puts that skill to the service of creating a world that is not quite ours (not yet anyway). I couldn't put this book down and was rooting for Myles, its narrator, even while I was a tiny bit horrified at his role in a world that itself is more than a tiny bit horrifying."
—SJ Rozan, bestselling author of Family Business

From the Publisher

2022-03-16
A strong-willed, highly seductive female virologist is found dead at a biotech firm's isolated research center in an unnamed place suggestive of Scandinavia. Myles, an investigator with a shadowy government agency, is on the case.

The biotech company's headquarters are in Ondstrand House, a one-time boarding school with a sordid past. The dead woman is Allegra Stans, who during her seven years with the firm seems to have slept with everyone on campus, men and women, before someone broke her neck. Myles—just Myles, don't call him "Agent Myles"—has a smorgasbord of possible suspects to interview, most of them hiding something. As he learns more and more about Allegra's frequently brief sexual adventures and why some people might have it in for her, he slowly uncovers a conspiracy involving synthetic neurotoxins (they have the properties of cobra snake venom) and "adeno-associated viruses." Allegra seems to have discovered something she wasn't supposed to, but what? A stand-alone from the author of Thick as Thieves (2011) and the John March series, the novel is an admirable attempt at melding Agatha Christie and Raymond Chandler, with hints of Nordic noir. But Myles, who narrates, is pretty much a blank slate, a clinical sort with a touch of sarcasm to lighten things but no personal history to speak of aside from the death two years ago of his girlfriend. He has an odd (some might say creepy) fixation on women's looks and smells, picking up "notes of pear and freesia" from one woman's perfume, admiring another woman's teeth that were "bright and even in a generous mouth," and taking notice of a woman's "tight chestnut curls...thick, springy, and anarchic." And there is nothing to suggest any physical presence on his part, so when he suddenly makes like Jack Reacher in a fight scene, you wonder where that came from.

A smart, atmospheric novel with a hole at its core.

Kirkus Reviews