Vancouver · Upmarket suspense

Janet Simons

Suspense without spectacle.

Two standalone novels about one Vancouver marriage, and the people who write the record when a city builds something it can't afford to get wrong.

Same family, different fraud.

Two complete manuscripts
Novelc. 70,000 words

Incidental Finding

Theo's story

Radiologist Theo Voss has built his career around one fear: the finding you talk yourself out of. Six months before the sickest patients in the city are moved into a new hospital, a misdirected email tells him a safety test was run again until it came back inside tolerance. Then the chest X-rays from the new tower start to look wrong.

Asking about it costs him his role, his privileges, and very nearly his licence.

Comps
Liz Moore, The God of the Woods; Claire Keegan, Small Things Like These
Note
Inspired by a real hospital build
Novelc. 67,000 words

AS-BUILT

Mara's story

Mara Voss runs a one-woman construction marketing firm from her kitchen island. She is brilliant at making clients look good on screen and terrible at asking what's behind the picture. Her biggest client is building a $196-million aquatic centre where the records don't match the work, and she has been quietly burying the questions.

After a worker dies on site, she has to turn her own tools against the false record she helped create.

Comps
Amy Jo Burns, Mercury; Laura Dave, The Last Thing He Told Me
Note
Companion to Incidental Finding

Each novel stands alone. Read together, they are one marriage seen from both sides.

Janet Simons
About

Janet Simons

Janet Simons is a practising physician in Vancouver, BC. Her specialty is laboratory medicine, where she reads results that other people will act on.

Her fiction is set in the Vancouver where she works: hospitals, construction sites, and the offices where someone decides what goes into the record. Incidental Finding and AS‑BUILT are her first two novels.

Contact

Representation enquiries

Both manuscripts are complete. Full manuscripts are available on request.