William Stronnar
one, unaccounted
In 1780, Benjamin Franklin founded an institution designed to survive the one thing he trusted least: people.
Ten men. Ten Seals. A fortune intended to grow for 250 years.
In Glasgow in the summer of 1959, twenty-one-year-old nurse Maggie McRae knows there is something wrong with the story of her uncle’s death. Her investigation leads to a clandestine organisation, a dangerous young Englishman called Anton Lytle, and a plain walnut box her father has gone to extraordinary lengths to hide.
Maggie steals it.
Then she disappears.
Sixty-five years later, Anton is dead, thousands have descended on a Cotswold market town to watch him burn, and something beneath a former RAF base has been running for sixty-seven hours.
Maggie is eighty-seven now. She still has the box. She has never opened it.
And beneath Stanwell Coombe, nine people are waiting for the tenth.
Because nothing may be done without the tenth.
The Third Trust begins in 1780 and runs through 2030 and beyond. It is an open-ended series rather than one built to a fixed number of books.
The question at the heart of The Third Trust
In the novel, Benjamin Franklin imagines machines that appear to reason. Two and a half centuries later, at Little Rissington, artificial intelligence and medical research are converging on something far more consequential: the ability to augment the human body, preserve the mind and perhaps make death a matter of choice.
But who decides what a human being should become? Who sets the limits? And what happens when the people with the power to cross them decide that the rules no longer apply?
Fredric Brown asked a version of this in 1954, in a short story called Answer. A supercomputer is switched on and asked whether there is a God. Its one-line reply is the reason the story is still quoted seventy years later.
About the author
William Stronnar has made a living cooking, building and turning his hand to whatever came next. Much of his writing takes shape on long walks with his dog.
He is drawn to the people history overlooks, the decisions that outlive their makers and the uncomfortable possibility that the official version of events is rarely the whole story.