Meet Polly Stevens — The PI Who Must Investigate Herself
Some crime fiction heroes are fearless. Polly Stevens is something far more compelling: she is a woman who is terrified of what she might find about her past, and goes looking anyway.
Book One *Unknown Caller* of my Orphan Project Trilogy introduces Polly, a twenty-six-year-old private investigator living alone in her late parents' bungalow. She is methodical, precise, and quietly brilliant. She cuts her own fringe with dressmaking scissors over the sink.
She leaves Chopin playing when she goes out, because silence in an empty house feels almost dangerous. She keeps lavender drying in a jar in the hallway and arranges her wardrobe by function and weight. She has built her entire life on order, because when you grow up with nothing solid, precision becomes the only comfort you can rely on.
But precision is a fragile thing when the evidence doesn't fit.
A Case She Cannot Walk Away From
Polly is good at her job. She reads people the way a graphic designer reads a composition. Always identifying what's wrong before anyone else sees it. She handles the quiet devastation of infidelity cases with professional detachment, photographs the spaces between people that say more than contact ever could, and writes her case notes in small, impatient capitals in a paper diary she trusts more than any tech.
Then she comes home one Tuesday afternoon with no memory of where she has been, her coat buttoned wrong, her work clothes missing, and fresh smoke in an oil barrel she doesn't remember using. Polly, the woman who investigates everyone else's secrets for a living, is forced to open the one case she has been most afraid of.
Her own.
The Little Girl in the Front Row
To understand Polly, you need to understand Glenmore House. A grey stone children's home in Wales, where Polly arrived at six years old after losing both parents, sadly orphaned, with no family left to go back to. She learned early what it meant to want to be good. Good enough to be liked. Good enough to be kept.
She sat still in photographs when other children fidgeted. She was obedient and exceptional at the things they asked her to be exceptional at. She did not ask questions about the night-time corridors, the private lift, or the room at the end of the basement corridor where a man she was never introduced to watched from a chair with the focused attention of someone reading a document.
She wanted to pass all the tests. She had no idea what each test was really for.
Twenty years later, the answers begins to surface, and they are far darker than anything she has ever uncovered for a client.
A Woman Built From Silence
What I love most about creating her and living in Polly's head is how much she carries without ever asking anyone to notice. She has a ginger cat called Tibby whose warm, indifferent weight she finds more comforting than she will ever admit.
She makes loose-leaf Earl Grey when her hands need something to do while her mind works. She hums music she doesn't consciously know and doesn't know why.
She is self-contained in the way of someone who learned very young that the wrong expression draws the wrong attention. She wears that composure like a coat she has never taken off, and slowly, chapter by chapter, she begins to understand who put it on her and why.
Polly is not a heroine who arrives with a gun and a plan. She arrives with a notepad, a pen, and the terrible, quiet courage of a woman who has decided she will not live with this blindly — even when blindly would be so much easier.
The Orphan Project Trilogy
Book One is available for BETA readers now. Book Two is already underway, and I can tell you that Polly is not done yet. Not even close.
If you've ever loved a character who is meticulous, and broken in equal measure, who is both the detective and the crime scene, who fights for her own mind with the same relentless precision she brings to every case, then Polly Stevens was written for you.
She'll stay with you long after the last page.