The recent dead have been trying to reach her for years—but their messages never made any sense until now.

The Recent Dead follows Flo, a twenty-three-year-old woman mourning the loss of her best friend, Lana, and working an unpaid, dead-end internship in media—all while receiving a constant barrage of text messages and voicemails that appear to be from the beyond. The messages are indecipherable, incoherent—and hair-raising. Eerie sounds over the phone. Jumbled text messages. And none of them are from the people Flo desperately wishes to speak to: Lana, or Flo’s mother, who died when Flo was six.

But then, one day, out of the blue, one of the messages is finally coherent—and it could only have come from Lana. This message sends Flo down a path of danger and discovery as she tries to uncover secrets that were buried with Lana when she died—secrets that desperately need to come out. Soon Flo will unearth a sinister web of lies, and a truth both menacing and surprising—but that may just set her free.