There is a moment in The Devil You Know where Gwen Adshead uses an analogy resembling a combination lock to describe the emergence of criminal violence: multiple conditions must align, and the absence of a single factor may prevent violence from ever being activated (Adshead & Horne, 2021). Her current book, Unspeakable, again written with Eileen Horne, returns to a related question: who survives trauma, and why? The book resists explanatory neatness. Instead, it accumulates clinical encounter, reflection, and literary allusion in a way that deliberately refuses resolution.