Four years after Ione Sarett receives what she believes are the final cremated remains of her daughter, an archival notice arrives from the institution that accepted Miren's body for medical education. It offers four classifications for what may remain:RETURNED. RETAINED. DISPOSED. OTHER. Miren has been marked OTHER. Forensic provenance auditor Carys Quillan is hired to investigate an apparently simple contradiction: a donor record marked closed is still connected to an active accession in another institution.
What begins as a database anomaly spreads across pathology archives, research repositories, derivative datasets, published studies, private records, and a system built to ensure that almost nothing is ever truly lost. Every institution has an explanation. Every individual decision can be defended. Almost every record is technically correct. Together, they may have crossed the only boundary that mattered.
CONSUMABLES is a literary suspense novel about bodily autonomy after death, the quiet power of administrative language, and what happens when preservation, usefulness, and consent stop meaning the same thing. Because returning a body is one thing. Knowing what has actually ended is another.
Four years after Ione Sarett receives what she believes are the final cremated remains of her daughter, an archival notice arrives from the institution that accepted Miren's body for medical education. It offers four classifications for what may remain:RETURNED. RETAINED. DISPOSED. OTHER. Miren has been marked OTHER. Forensic provenance auditor Carys Quillan is hired to investigate an apparently simple contradiction: a donor record marked closed is still connected to an active accession in another institution.
What begins as a database anomaly spreads across pathology archives, research repositories, derivative datasets, published studies, private records, and a system built to ensure that almost nothing is ever truly lost. Every institution has an explanation. Every individual decision can be defended. Almost every record is technically correct. Together, they may have crossed the only boundary that mattered.
CONSUMABLES is a literary suspense novel about bodily autonomy after death, the quiet power of administrative language, and what happens when preservation, usefulness, and consent stop meaning the same thing. Because returning a body is one thing. Knowing what has actually ended is another.
