The Standby

An Alexandre Sarraf Investigation

A contract fitter dies inside a fermentation vessel on the Firth of Forth. Five safety barriers failed. Four of them killed him.

Alexandre Sarraf investigates industrial deaths for a Swiss reinsurer, the kind of man a company calls when its own story about what happened stops adding up. His method is simple, and it has never once let him down: a real accident is wasteful. It fails in more ways than it needs to. When a death has needed exactly enough failures, and not one more, that isn't bad luck. That's a budget.

At Cauldrigg Bioethanol, on the Scottish coast, the file says exactly what it should. A standby man who left his post. A permit rolled over three days running. A monitor overdue its calibration by nearly two years. Enough to close the case and move on.

Sarraf doesn't move on. And what he finds waiting under the fifth failure isn't the murder he expected.

Filed: accidental death. Case reopened.

The Standby is the short novelette that opens the Alexandre Sarraf Investigations: fair-play, closed-circle mysteries built from two decades inside the energy industry. Real ports, real permits, invented sites, and the machinery that keeps a dangerous industry running until, one day, it doesn't.

Short enough for one sitting. And it's free.

← Back to the series