Second Hand

He died on a Sunday. He woke on Monday. By then someone in his family had already murdered him.

Bradley David Christopher is a hundred and fifty years old and looks fifty. He designed the technology that makes his own return possible, and every night at nine o'clock he winds the pocket watch that records who he is. When he dies in June, seven weeks after his wedding, that record wakes in a perfect likeness of his own face, a dry, courteous, exact man who remembers everything up to the last night, and who soon learns that the death was no accident.

Then the law gets its say. Under the Continuity Act, which he drafted himself, a court has thirty days to rule whether he is a person or a piece of property. Until it does, the will is frozen. If he is a person, his heirs inherit nothing. So his son, his daughter, his grandson, and his granddaughter the trustee all have the same prayer: that he be declared a thing.

His new wife Maria, who kept his house for eleven years and loved him first, is everyone's favorite suspect. A kidnap attempt on their honeymoon in Oaxaca points at an old boyfriend with debts. And the heir to everything is Cornelia, called Nell, thirteen years old, a girl he raised from infancy, who repairs watches and says exactly what she means.

A fair-play murder mystery for the far future, with a poisoner's patience, a courtroom clock, and a narrator with thirty days to name the killer. Second Hand is a standalone novel from Baldwin Nash, author of Open Sky and Nothing Forgets. He is dead. He is also in the room.