Seven Down - Paperback

by David Whitton (Author)

In this quirky, character-driven debut novel seven hotel employees puzzle out the events of a botched assassination attempt -- the next read for fans of Fredrik Backman (Anxious People) and Matt Haig (The Midnight Library).

Finalist for the 2022 Crime Writers of Canada Award for Best First Novel

Seven ordinary hotel employees. Catering, Reservations, Management. Seven moles, waiting for years for a single code word, a trigger that will send them into action in a violent event that will end their dull lives as they know them.

The event has failed: the action was a disaster. Each employee is being debriefed by an agent of an invisible organization. These are the transcripts of those interviews. What they reveal is not just the intricate mechanism of an international assassination, but the yearnings inside each of its pawns, the desperation and secret rage that might cause any one of us to sign up, sell out, and take a plunge into darkness.

Both sinister and absurd, Seven Down is a puzzle to be solved, a comedy, and a panorama of life. At once sociological, satirical, and scary, it paints portraits of the mundane human failings behind geopolitical machinations.

A RARE MACHINES BOOK

Author Biography

David Whitton is the author of The Reverse Cowgirl, a story collection. His short fiction has appeared in a number of journals and anthologies, including Darwin's Bastards, Best Canadian Stories, and The Journey Prize Stories, and he is a graduate of the University of Guelph's Creative Writing MFA program. David lives in Toronto.