Somebody
signed off
on a death.
Nora Bexley writes crime novels set inside the industrial world most people never see: refineries, tank terminals, mines, the night shift on a manufacturing floor.
People die in those places. Sometimes it is an accident. Sometimes it is negligence so routine that nobody can name the day it turned criminal. And sometimes it is a murder built to look like the first two.
Read The Standby, free
Novelette · An Alexandre Sarraf Investigation
A man dies inside a fermentation vessel at a bioethanol plant in Fife. Five safety barriers failed on the morning of the ninth of November, and the inquiry has already written them all down.
Alexandre Sarraf is a loss adjuster for a Swiss reinsurer. He is not sent to find out who did it. He is sent to find out what it costs.
What he notices is that one of the five failures did not need to be there at all.
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The series
Alexandre Sarraf investigates industrial deaths that have already been ruled accidental. Each book takes one site, one fatality, and one claim, and works out what actually happened to the person and what it will cost the people still standing.
The procedure is real. The permits, the alarms, the isolations, the paperwork that follows a death: all of it works on the page the way it works on a plant. The sites are invented. The cities are not.
- The StandbyFife, Scotland · out now
- The PermitBotlek, Rotterdam · in progress
- UntitledLiberty County, Texas
- UntitledJubail, Saudi Arabia
Nora Bexley
Nora Bexley is a pseudonym. Behind it is twenty-five years spent in and around heavy industry: refineries, tank terminals, permit-to-work systems, and the alarms that go off all shift on nothing at all.
If you work in this world and something on the page is wrong, that is worth hearing about. Write to hello@norabexley.com. It is read, and mostly answered.