CLEAN CUT
A Forensic Mystery in Five Parts
A Novella with Three Endings
About the Book
At eight forty-two on an October evening, a hotel worker checking a hospitality suite finds Graham Whitcomb, founder of Veritas Biometric Systems and the keynote speaker at a Boston symposium on the future of forensic identification, dead on the carpet.
Detective Sarah Morrow wants a name. Forensic scientist Iris Quell wants to know what the evidence can bear. Between them lie a dead man with no shortage of enemies: a former partner suing him over stolen research, a scientist whose paper he tried to bury, an estranged wife, and Dr. Miriam Sloane, the forensic consultant who challenged him in public that afternoon and met him in private an hour later.
Sloane’s conference lecture, The Limits of Attribution, ends with a demonstration: ten piano notes grouped five, three, two, and then a silence the audience cannot help filling with a note that was never played. Her point is that the listener supplies the pattern. The investigators spend the rest of the book trying not to, as glass particles that seem to place a suspect in the room turn out to be everywhere in the hotel, a chronology that seems to fall into shape dissolves under stricter definitions, and an old wrongful conviction surfaces with Whitcomb’s name on one side of it and Sloane’s signature on the other.
What the record can prove and what it cannot are the whole of the case. And when the evidence runs out, the book does something unusual: it offers the reader three places to stop, each a complete ending, each revealing a little more than the last. Where you stop is the ending you choose.
Clean Cut is a forensic mystery built on the architecture of a fugue, about the difference between observation and inference, the weight a signature carries, and the note the mind insists on hearing when none has been played.
A Novel in Words. A Score in Counterpoint.
Museca is composing an original chamber score to accompany Clean Cut, built on the same five-note subject and the same five-three-two phrase that run through the novella. Like the book, the album will have three final tracks, each of which can be the last.
The soundtrack will be available at museca.org on release.
Read the Book
Clean Cut: A Forensic Mystery in Five Parts is available here as a complete PDF.
After the Book
Notes on Clean Cut is a companion in two essays by P. A. Rallax: the first on the novella’s fugue structure, its three endings, and the writers and composers who have ended a work more than once; the second on the music inside the story and the score being written for it.
Both essays discuss the ending. Read the novella first.
Download Notes on Clean Cut — A Companion — PDF ↓
Written by P. A. Rallax | Copyright © 2026
Clean Cut is a work of fiction. Names, characters, institutions, and events are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.