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The Second Call
Paperback
Mystery & ThrillerGeneral Fiction
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Publisher: Independently Published
Pages: 302
Weight: 0.89
Height: 0.68 Width: 6.00 Depth: 9.00
Language: English
Vibeke Halskov has spent twenty-nine years at a Danish pension fund writing letters to four hundred thousand strangers about their futures. She has a rule pinned above her monitor: say the number in the first three lines. Everything else in a pension letter is context, and context read before a number is not read at all.
On a Tuesday in March, at fourteen minutes past eleven, a very good oncologist telephones her with a number.
She resigns within the hour. Over the following twelve weeks she gives away three hundred and twenty thousand kroner to a colleague's son she barely knows, tells her sister exactly what nine years of a care home cost her, says nine words to a married man she has eaten lunch with six hundred times, and buys a metal detector she has wanted since 1989.
And she tells nobody why - not her employer, not her sister, not one person. Because twenty-nine years of writing to people about their retirement has taught her precisely what happens to somebody once the room has a number for them.
On the fourth of June the telephone rings again. A report was filed against a transposed civil registration number on the afternoon of the fourth of March. The scan was somebody's. It was not hers.
Everything she did stands. And she has no defence, because she never gave a reason.
From the author of Table Eleven, Nothing to Declare and The Most Popular Man in Lyon.
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