The Forgotten Dead

A young woman is the sole survivor from an overloaded dingy carrying refugees across the Mediterranean. In the dead of night, she makes her way into a harbor in southern Spain, disoriented and afraid. In the next cove, a Swedish tourist wakes at dawn from a romantic encounter on the beach and finds a black man dead in the water – yet another supposed African migrant in the waves of anonymous dead washing up onto European shores.

In New York, scenographer Ally Cornwall has just learned she’s pregnant. Her beloved husband Patrick, a highly acclaimed investigative journalist, is in France working on a story about human trafficking. When Ally can’t get hold of Patrick to share her good news, she begins to get worried. One day a package arrives for her from Patrick, postmarked a week earlier. Inside are his field notes and blurry photos of men in suits, along with a cryptic message to store the documents for safekeeping. Something is wrong, she knows it. Harboring both panic and their child inside her, Ally boards a plane to Paris. Now she must follow the meager clues she has in order to trace Patrick’s footsteps, which lead her from the corridors of powerful men to rundown safe houses for African migrants being held as modern-day slaves, and finally to a truth more devastating than she could ever have imagined.

Beautifully written and breathlessly paced, The Forgotten Dead is a complexly woven puzzle of a story that exposes the sordid underbelly of our globalized world, where human lives are nothing but commodities to be bought and sold and where dark forces will stop at nothing to earn profit.