What the Night Cannot Smell

Dane Wexley is a werewolf who cannot smell anything at all.

Twelve years ago a fire in the Marshgate dormitory burned the nose out of him and took eleven children with it. For a wolf, that is half a life. For the supernatural city of Saltmire, where a scent signature is identity, evidence, and law all at once, it makes him a blank: a man no pack can track, no court can read, and no house can prove exists. He has spent the years since doing the only work left to him, finding people who do not want to be found, and carrying a chrome card case full of labeled scent cards that he has borrowed, one at a time, from the dead.

Then Ottilie Drazan, Countess of the Old Court, hires him to find a missing nine-year-old girl. Pia Sorren is mixed blood, vampire father and wolf mother, disowned by both sides, and she has been gone three days. The room she was taken from holds blood, hair, and a body, and no scent signature at all. Whoever took her left Dane a card with his own name on it, spelled the way his mother spelled it, and he does not know why a killer would leave a note for the one man in the city who cannot read it.

The answer spreads upward fast. Saltmire's murders are becoming untraceable. Rooms that should shout a killer's name go quiet, and no court on either side can take a case it cannot smell. Dane learns there is a drug for that, street name hollow, and that the fire that took his nose was its first human trial, run on eleven children by the very pack he grew up in, on the doctrine that a wolf who cannot be read can never be hanged. The chain runs through Haverly Chemical, the cold vat halls of the Sallow Works, and a ledger with eleven names on it, the last of which is his own.

It also runs through his family. His brother Ansel carried him out of the fire and then went back up the stairs he had set. The Keeper of the Garrow Yard authorized the trial and will not lie about it. A chemist who has been dead for twenty years is alive behind a laundry, and the Countess's own son has been humming half a bar before every word for eighty years under the city.

And every time Dane borrows a scent memory to reconstruct a scene, it costs him. The borrowing strips away what wolf he has left, warmth and instinct and pack resonance, one card at a time, and takes his human speech while he does it. By the end he will not be able to shift at all. The only thing the drug cannot take from him is the nose that reads.

What the Night Cannot Smell is a cold, hard-boiled supernatural suspense novel about a broken detective, a drug that erases the only kind of evidence that ever mattered, and a cross-species hearing where the one witness nobody can buy is a man who chose to be nothing so that every other name could be found.