The Tenth Witness, a prequel to the award-winning All Cry Chaos, is the tale of a man upended: a twenty-eight-year-old who rejects a brilliant career in engineering for a dark, uncertain one in international police work.
On the night of October 9, 1799, the frigate HMS Lutine broke apart on the shoals of the Frisian Islands off the Dutch coast. When the insurer Lloyds of London paid on the wreck, it took ownership and planned expeditions to recoup the lost millions in gold and silver. Nearly two hundred years later, after a series of largely failed salvage operations, Lloyds tries again—this time on the strength of new technologies and a strategy devised by the gifted young engineer Henri Poincar├®.
It is late spring 1978, and Poincar├® has worked nearly to exhaustion preparing for the Lutine dive. Before the salvage season begins, however, he takes a rare holiday: a hike at low tide across the vast, muddy flats of the Wadden Sea. His guide is Liesel Kraus, who is smart, able, appealing—and troubled. She and her brother Anselm are haunted by a violent history that generates both rage and, as the directors of Kraus Steel, an enormous, corrupting wealth. The closer Poincar├® draws to Liesel and Anselm, the more warped life becomes until, finally, love and a death threat compel him to investigate what no one else will—aside from Interpol. It seems that pain as well as treasure can be dredged up from the past to reshape the present.
Leonard Rosen is the author of the highly acclaimed literary thriller All Cry Chaos, which won the 2012 Macavity Award for Best First Novel and ForeWord’s Editor’s Choice Prize in 2011. It was also a finalist for an Edgar Award, Chautauqua Prize, and Anthony Award. Rosen has written bestselling textbooks on writing, taught writing at Harvard and at Bentley University, and contributed radio commentaries to WBUR, Boston’s NPR news station. He lives in Brookline, Massachusetts.
Grover Gardner has recorded more than 650 audiobooks since beginning his career in 1981. He's been named one of the "Best Voices of the Century" as well as a "Golden Voice" by AudioFile magazine. Gardner has garnered over 20 AudioFile Earphones Awards and is the recipient of an Audio Publishers Association Audie Award, as well as a three-time finalist. In 2005, Publishers Weekly deemed him "Audiobook Narrator of the Year." Gardner has also narrated hundreds of audiobooks under the names Tom Parker and Alexander Adams. Among his many titles are Marcus Sakey's At the City's Edge, as well as Star Wars: The Phantom Menace, Mark Twain's The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, and John Irving's The Cider House Rules. Gardner studied Theater and Art History at Rollins College and received a Master's degree in Acting from George Washington University. He lives in Oregon with his significant other and daughter.