Credit: A Shorthand to Murder by Gareth Dorne

Invisibility was her armor. Her meticulous notes might just solve a murder.

​📖 Character Overview

​To the wealthy patrons, MPs, and socialites she works for, thirty-four-year-old Agnes Pruitt is little more than a useful piece of office furniture. A freelance shorthand specialist and former legal secretary, Agnes has spent a decade perfecting a mask of polite, attentive blankness. She moves through rooms unnoticed, transcribing confidential secrets, legal depositions, and dictations at breakneck speed.

​What her employers fail to realize is that Agnes hoards information like currency. Gifted with an uncanny eye for detail and an analytical mind, she catalogs every lie, contradiction, and slip of the tongue. When a death aboard a voyage mirrors a murder method she previously transcribed in secret dictation, Agnes realizes her precision was weaponized without her consent. Refusing to let her work be used for murder, the quiet secretary turns amateur sleuth—armed with her shorthand notebooks, an encyclopedic knowledge of coastal birds, and a razor-sharp intellect.

​Performance & Traits

​Personality: INTJ / Enneagram 5w6. Highly analytical, observant, hypervigilant, quiet, deeply principled, self-controlled, and fiercely intelligent beneath a neutral veneer.

​Appearance: Lean build, dark brown hair in a practical bun, cool grey eyes, ink-stained right index finger with a Pitman pencil callus on her thumb, dressed in understated navy/charcoal attire.

​The Vibe: Reserved, razor-sharp, quiet authority. She speaks in complete, economical sentences, never raises her voice, and asks questions that sound like polite clarifications but are actually damning accusations.