Declared Dead

Claire Mercer comes home from France expecting to return to her husband and her old life. Instead, the government says she has been dead for eleven months. Her driver's licence is cancelled. Her bank records are closed. A death certificate exists in her name. Her husband insists he does not know her—and says his wife, Claire Mercer, is buried in a cemetery. Then the impossible becomes worse. The body in Claire's grave was identified with her fingerprints, her dental records, and her DNA. As Detective Maya Ross begins investigating, Claire discovers that her death is not a clerical mistake but part of a decades-old conspiracy involving stolen identities, altered records, behavioural conditioning, and a secret program known as Project Mirror. The deeper she digs, the less certain she becomes about her own past. Her real name may not be Claire. The family she remembers may not be the family she was born into. And the people who claim they were protecting her may be the same people who helped erase her. To survive, she must uncover who was buried under her name, expose the system that declared her dead, and decide whether identity is something written in a database—or something only she has the right to choose. Declared Dead is a fast-paced psychological conspiracy thriller about identity, betrayal, memory, and one woman's fight to prove that she is still alive.