Excerpt from I Am Pilgrim by Terry Hayes, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

I'm still reeling from the vivid imagining of it all, so I barely register a rough hand taking my shoulder. As soon as I do, I throw it off, about to break his arm instantly – an echo from an earlier life, I'm afraid. It is some guy who mumbles a terse apology, looking at me strangely, trying to move me aside. He's the leader of a forensic team – three guys and a woman – setting up the UV lamps and dishes of the Fast Blue B dye they'll use to test the mattress for semen stains. They haven't found out about the antiseptic yet and I don't tell them – for all I know the killer missed a part of the bed. If he did, given the nature of the Eastside Inn, I figure they'll get several thousand positive hits dating back to when hookers wore stockings.

I get out of their way, but I'm deeply distracted: I'm trying to close everything out because there is something about the room, the whole situation – I'm not exactly sure what – that is troubling me. A part of the scenario is wrong, and I can't tell why. I look around, taking another inventory of what I see, but I can't find it – I have a sense it's from earlier in the night. I go back, mentally rewinding the tape to when I first walked in.

What was it? I reach down into my subconscious, trying to recover my first impression – it was something detached from the violence, minor but with overriding significance. If only I could touch it . . . a feeling . . . it's like . . . it's some word that is lying now on the other side of memory. I start thinking about how I wrote in my book that it is the assumptions, the unquestioned assumptions, that trip you up every time – and then it comes to me.

When I walked in, I saw the six-pack on the bureau, a carton of milk in the fridge, registered the names of a few DVDs lying next to the TV, noted the liner in a trash can. And the impression – the word – that first entered my head but didn't touch my conscious mind was 'female'. I got everything right about what had happened in Room 89 – except for the biggest thing of all. It wasn't a young guy who was staying here; it wasn't a naked man who was having sex with Eleanor and cut her throat. It wasn't a clever prick who destroyed her features with acid and drenched the room with antiseptic spray.

It was a woman.

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