The Woman Who Collected Beetles: A Sapphic Speculative Thriller

A woman covered in blood.
A body in the middle of the Edinburgh Festival.
A story no one wants to believe.

When Detective Inspector Gillian Durban is called to a crime scene before dawn, she finds a stranger sitting beside the victim, staring at the rooftops as if waiting for another attack.

Iska Harrak has no documents. She doesn’t appear in any database. What she does have is an impossible story.

Durban assumes she is a traumatized former combatant fleeing some war—perhaps a killer, perhaps a witness who can’t be trusted.

Iska tells the truth from the very beginning. But in this world, some truths are the kind no one wants to hear.

To the police, she is a suspect. To a government agency, an anomaly best kept hidden. To the asylum system, a refugee with no past and no country to return to.

To Inspector Durban, she becomes the woman worth betraying everything she once swore to protect.

The Woman Who Collected Beetles is a tense speculative thriller with a sapphic romance, an impossible protagonist, an inspector on the edge, and a question you won’t be able to ignore.