Post Mortal

Synopsis

Barry Wapping has been delivering post in the same West Yorkshire town since 1982. He knows his patch better than anyone: which houses have dogs, which neighbours take in parcels, and which of his regulars are the sort who’d give you a bottle of water on a hot day. Mrs Hopper was one of those. So when Barry arrives with a bundle of condolence cards only to find her daughter already at the door – house up for sale, mail redirected overnight, everything tidied away at suspicious speed – he can’t let it go.

What begins as a nagging professional instinct slowly becomes something far more entangling. As Barry unpicks the connections between Mrs Hopper’s death, a property agent with a troubling marital history, a string of unexplained disappearances, and a woman who may not be who she claims to be, the investigation grows larger and stranger than anything his methodical postman’s mind was prepared for.

Post Mortal is a brilliantly observed, wryly funny novel about the invisible people who witness our lives from the outside: the ones who notice when the routine breaks. Barry is an indelible creation – a widower still carrying a private grief, a man of dry wit and careful loyalty, who finds himself the most unlikely of sleuths in a mystery that cuts uncomfortably close to home.