Always (Aud Trilogy #3)

by Nicola Griffith

(Picador, paperback, 2025)

"This is the third thrill ride featuring Torvingen, the most complex yet...Little is held back: the violence, the eroticism, the shocking plot turns..."
--Seattle Post-Intelligencer

"If Jack Reacher had a sister, she'd be Aud Torvingen . . . he would love her, but he'd be a little scared of her, too."
―Lee Child

Aud Torvingen has never worried about violence. To her it is simply a tool, one of many, to be used, as appropriate, with dispassion, speed, and precision. InAlways, she takes on a new challenge: teaching a group of ordinary Atlanta women self-defense skills.

It doesn't matter how well trained you are, how big, how fast, how strong; there will always be someone out there bigger or faster or stronger. Always.That's what Aud tells her students--but she never imagined the consequences of imparting that lesson, which shake her to the core.

To regroup, she travels to Seattle to meet her Norwegian diplomat mother and her mother's new husband. She's also there to handle what looks to be a run-of-the-mill fraud at one of her investment properties, currently being used as a movie set. Big money is in play, and it seems someone is sabotaging the production.

In intertwined Seattle and Atlanta narratives--seductive, and breathtakingly taut--Nicola Griffith pushes Aud to the limits of self-reliance and makes Aud face the appalling, and appealing, prospect of allowing herself to need other people.

Nicola Griffith is a dual UK/US citizen who lives in Seattle, Washington. She is the author of award-winning novels including Spear, Hild, and Ammonite, and has written for Nature, New Scientist, The New York Times, The Guardian, and other publications. She is the founder and cohost of #CripLit, holds a PhD from Anglia Ruskin University, and enjoys a ferocious bout of wheelchair boxing. She is married to the novelist and screenwriter Kelley Eskridge.