WE'LL NEVER KNOW

London journalists delve into an increasingly complex and precarious conspiracy in Tree’s thriller set a few decades in the future.

Timothy Wyndham, a noted science correspondent for an English newspaper, generally turns down readers’ requests for personal meetings. He does, however, ultimately meet with one woman, Melissa Hogg, who’s convinced that her astrophysicist husband is in danger, and she hands Timothy photographs of a reputed saucer-shaped military prototype tied to a Royal Air Force base in Somerset, England. After a scientist tied to that RAF base mysteriously dies, Timothy sees a potential story. He gets assistance, albeit reluctantly, from Cathy Edge, a journalist at his publication whose past dalliance with him ended badly. Mostly what they dig up are more questions—about a second unexplained death, a seemingly untouchable neo-Nazi, and an enigmatic American who warns them to quit nosing around. Timothy and Cathy are dead set on getting their exclusive, provided they can stay alive long enough to piece together the growing puzzle. While Tree piles on the mysteries, the memorable cast makes the dense plot easy to follow. For example, it’s always apparent whom Timothy and Cathy trust and whom they suspect are villains; the unnerving American falls into the latter camp. Timothy also has a relationship with a newspaper intern, Adalyn, who navigates their explicitly detailed trysts with him in a businesslike fashion, which effectively throws the sexist protagonist into a deserved tailspin. Timothy’s first-person narration aptly recounts banter with Cathy and blends references to real-life government programs with SF tech. The prose also shines throughout: “Time was getting on and twilight could already be inferred from the sky’s greyness, which stretched unabated over the flatness of the airfield and the countryside beyond it.”

A clever, fleet-footed cross-genre story with striking characters and unexpected turns.