Misclosure

A cave survey is a sworn account. You go into the dark with an instrument, you come out with numbers, and if the loop you walked does not close, the numbers are telling you something you have not found yet.

June Hallam has been sent to resurvey Scarthwaite Pot for a new edition of the atlas. It is careful, unglamorous work and she is very good at it. On the first trip the loop closes at four tenths of one per cent - a boring, blameless number.

On the second it is nine tenths. On the third it is one point seven, and the error points in the same direction every time, which random error does not do.

Somewhere past station 47, in a passage that a thirty-two-year-old survey marks as choked, something is not adding up. And the man who drew that survey is standing next to her.

MISCLOSURE is a novel about measurement, and about what it costs a careful person to keep writing down what the instruments actually say. It is set underground in the Yorkshire Dales, among people who go into caves on purpose, and it is built out of the real discipline of cave surveying: survey grades, loop closure, blunder detection, and the quiet, defensible, entirely legitimate practice of distributing an error you would rather nobody looked at.

The horror here does not jump out. It accumulates, at a constant rate, in the third decimal place.

WHAT TO EXPECT

A tight, single-location novel told in the first person by a hydrogeologist who trusts numbers more than she trusts people, and who turns out to be right to.

Slow-building dread rather than gore. Nothing in this book is louder than it needs to be.

Seven pages of reproduced survey data, set as the reader would actually encounter it, in which the arithmetic does most of the frightening.

A small cast, a moor, a hole in the ground, and one figure that will not stop going up.

For readers of quiet literary horror, of claustrophobic British suspense, and of stories in which the most disturbing thing on the page is a table of numbers that is perfectly correct.