Kaia Kingston

Hand drawn cover of Whispers Through the Wire, showing a woman in a red hat, an antique telephone, and a bleeding rose in pencil and red

Now taking the case

Whispers Through the Wire

The Cotton City Murders · Book One

Manchester, 1900. The telephone is a modern miracle. Then a voice on the wire begins to promise murder.

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The case file

The Book

She is the city's only female private detective, and Cotton City never lets her forget it. She has fought for every case, every client, every scrap of respect in a world certain that detection is no work for a woman.

Her newest client arrives trembling, having received a threatening telephone call unlike anything she has heard: flat, cold, and strangely mechanical. Soon the calls are spreading across the city. Then people begin to disappear.

With the police overwhelmed and unwilling to listen, the young detective alone stands between the voice and its victims. But as she follows the whispers through fog bound streets, humming mills, and the tangled wires above Manchester, the case begins to pull at the darkness of her own past, and the voice on the wire seems to know exactly where to find her.

Manchester Central Telegraph Office · Received 1900

COMING SOON TO AMAZON STOP FIRST NOVEL IN THE COTTON CITY MURDERS STOP FOR READERS OF VERONICA SPEEDWELL AND LADY SHERLOCK STOP

Person of interest

The Author

Kaia Kingston wrote and illustrated Whispers Through the Wire at fourteen years old. Every illustration is drawn by hand, including the cover art itself.

Born in England and raised on mysteries, Kaia returned to the country of her birth for her first series, setting it in Manchester in 1900, a city of telephones, telegraph wires, and towering cotton mills. She now lives on the Gold Coast, Australia, where she spends her days writing, drawing, and plotting the next Cotton City mystery.