Excerpt from We Solve Murders by Richard Osman, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

Excerpt
We Solve Murders

You must leave as few clues as possible. That's the only rule.

You have to talk to people sometimes; it's inevitable. There are orders to be given, shipments to be arranged, people to be killed, etc., etc.

You cannot exist in a vacuum, for goodness' sake. You need to ring François Loubet? In an absolute emergency? You'll get a phone with a voice-changer built-in. And, by the way, if it's not an absolute emergency, you'll regret ringing very soon.

But most communication is by message or email. High-end criminals are much like millennials in that way.

Everything is encrypted, naturally, but what if the authorities break the code? It happens. A lot of very good criminals are in prison right now because a nerd with a laptop had too much time on their hands. So you must hide as well as you can.

You can hide your IP address — that is very easy. François Loubet's emails go through a world tour of different locations before being sent. Even a nerd with a laptop would never be able to discover from where they were actually sent.

But everyone's language leaves a unique signature. A particular use of words, a rhythm, a personality. Someone could read an email, and then read a postcard you sent in 2009 and know for a fact they were sent by the same person. Science, you see. So often the enemy of the honest criminal.

That's why ChatGPT has been such a godsend. After writing an email, a text, anything really, you can simply run the whole thing through ChatGPT and it instantly deletes your personality. It flattens you out, irons your creases, washes you away, quirk by quirk, until you disappear.

"ChatGPT, rewrite this email as a friendly English gentleman, please." That is always Loubet's prompt.

Handy, because if these emails were written in François Loubet's own language, it would all become much more obvious. Too obvious.

But, as it stands, you might find a thousand emails, but you would still have no way of knowing where François Loubet was and you would still have no way of knowing who François Loubet is.

You would, of course, know what François Loubet does, but there would be precious little you could do about it.

* * *

"Cat, ginger, unapproachable. Haughty even, the little bugger. Mason's Lane. Contact attempted but rebuffed. 3:58 a.m."

Steve puts his Dictaphone back in his pocket. He hears the sound of the ginger cat inexpertly scaling a back fence. It was not often he saw an unfamiliar cat on his walk. It was almost certainly nothing, but almost everything was almost certainly nothing, wasn't it? And yet some things did eventually turn out to be something. He once caught an armed robber because of a Twix wrapper in a blast furnace. One rarely knows the significance of things at the time, and it doesn't cost a penny piece to note things down.

Steve turns left on to the top of the High Street, and sees it stretch out like an unspooling gray ribbon before him, lit by the dim bulb of the moon. If you were to visit Axley — and you should, you'd like it — you might think you had found the perfect English village. A gently sloping High Street, looping around a touch at the bottom where it skirts the bank of the village pond. There are two pubs, The Brass Monkey and The Flagon, identical to the tourists but teeming with subtle and important differences to the locals. For example, one flies a Union Jack and the other the Ukrainian flag. There's a butcher, a baker. No candlestick maker, but you will find a little gift shop selling scented candles and bookmarks.

Striped awnings, bicycles leaned against shopfronts, chalkboards promising cream teas or tarot readings or dog treats. There is a church at the top of the village, and a small bookmakers at the bottom of the village, take your pick. Steve used to visit both, and now visits neither.

Excerpted from We Solve Murders by Richard Osman. Copyright © 2024 by Richard Osman. Excerpted by permission of Pamela Dorman Books. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.