Some houses are haunted by the dead. Number Seventeen is haunted by what the living chose to forget. Autumn, 1976. When investigator Latimer arrives in a forgotten English town, he expects an unusual but ultimately explainable case: an elderly couple have been found dead in their bed, their deaths officially declared natural. But there is nothing natural about the words that appeared upon their bodies. GUILT. MURDERER. Nor can anyone explain the glass marbles clenched in their dead hands. At the centre of the mystery stands Number Seventeen, an ordinary red-brick house on Sycamore Lane. Its neighbours avoid speaking about it. Its history is fractured by disappearances, unexplained deaths and the names of children who seem to have been deliberately erased from the town's memory. And somewhere inside the house, a child is crying. At first, Latimer hears the cry from behind the walls. Then it comes closer. Then it calls his name. As his investigation draws him deeper into the history of Number Seventeen, Latimer begins to understand that he has been asking the wrong question. He was never brought there to discover how the couple died. Something else has been waiting for him. Something buried beneath decades of silence. Something that does not want revenge. It wants to be remembered. And the closer Latimer comes to the truth, the more impossible it becomes to tell where the haunting ends and the house begins. THE CRY is a slow-burning Gothic horror novel about memory, guilt and the terrible consequences of silence—a story of a forgotten child, a town that learned not to ask questions, and a house that has waited a very long time for someone willing to listen. Because the dead do not always haunt us for what we have done. Sometimes they haunt us for what we allowed ourselves to forget.
