Crime & espionage fiction
Alexander Langwrites the long game.
Grounded, character-driven crime and espionage thrillers — patient in exactly the places most novels rush. Debut novel Dead Water is complete.
About
The patience behind the plot
Alexander Lang writes grounded, character-driven crime and espionage thrillers. His debut novel, Dead Water — Book One of the Dead series, a Thomas Mercer Investigation — is complete and currently out on submission, the opening chapter in a planned trilogy that continues with Dead Ground and Dead Hand.
He first found the genre through a battered copy of Frederick Forsyth's The Day of the Jackal, picked up as a teenager and read in a single sitting. It was the patience of it that stayed with him — the slow accumulation of small, ordinary facts that adds up, eventually, to something enormous. He has been writing toward that same patience ever since.
When he's not writing, Alexander can usually be found restoring old wristwatches — a habit that crept, unasked, into more than one of his characters.
The debut novel
Dead Water
A boat runs aground at low tide, and eleven people are missing. The case that follows doesn't stay a smuggling case for long.
When a grounded boat is found empty on the Stiffkey saltmarsh, DCI Thomas Mercer expects a smuggling case — the kind Norfolk has quietly absorbed for centuries. Instead, each thread he pulls leads somewhere larger: forged permits, a guarantor with too much to lose, and a network patient enough to wait months for a single afternoon.
That afternoon is a summer garden party, and the guest list is the kind that gets a county sealed off for a day. Mercer has until then to work out who's still telling the truth — his own people included — before the coast he's policed his whole life becomes the last place anyone thinks to look.
The Dead series
One county. Three reckonings.
Each book stands alone; together they follow what one buried arrangement costs the people who keep finding it.
Stay in the loop
Word travels slowly here — on purpose.
Leave your email for word on Dead Water's publication and early news of Dead Ground. No noise in between.
Rights & representation
Alexander Lang is not yet represented. Agents and editors are welcome to get in touch using the form below.