Everything in Order

About the book

A couple arrives for a quiet dinner in a good restaurant. The allergy is known. The staff is told. The evening is supposed to stay in order.

It doesn't.

Detective Erin Kelleher is called to The Birch Room after a diner collapses at table seventeen. What happened there should have been a medical emergency, or an accident, or a failure of ordinary care. The statements, habits, and small inconsistencies refuse to settle into any of those shapes.

Everything in Order is built from things people did correctly: warnings given, notes taken, routines followed. Each action looks reasonable in isolation. Together they leave Erin with a death that still has to be classified, and a room of people who each have a version of how the evening was supposed to go.

The restaurant did what restaurants do: took a reservation, noted an allergy, served a meal. The unsettling possibility is that a devastating outcome can emerge even when everyone appears to have done what they were supposed to do.