The Final Chapter
A Novel
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4.0 • 1 Rating
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- $14.99
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
"A canny, double-layered literary puzzle...boasting tantalizing narrative twists." —The Boston Globe
"C.B. Everett is a master of fiendishly-plotted, intelligent mysteries." —Mark Edwards, internationally bestselling author of The Wasp Trap
A missing bestselling author. A final manuscript encoded with clues to his fate. And a best friend racing to get to the final chapter...
From the author of the “blackly funny” (John Connolly, New York Times bestselling author) The Other People, a gripping book-within-a-book thriller that is perfect for fans of Anthony Horowitz and Janice Hallett.
Ten years ago, a bestselling, critically acclaimed literary author disappeared without a trace…and without a final novel. In recent days, that missing manuscript has surfaced, but strangely enough, it’s not another genius work of literary fiction, but an espionage novel full of all-too-stereotypical spycraft and James Bond-like twists.
His former publisher has asked the author’s best friend—and fellow author named C.B. Everett—to annotate the novel with details from real life to give the strange novel context within his larger oeuvre. But as C.B. reads, he finds the espionage thriller is filled with references to events and people who feel a little too familiar, and soon he’s wondering if the novel might in fact be a key to his missing friend’s disappearance. There’s text and subtext aplenty, and C.B. is determined to learn once and for all what happened to his friend through solving the mystery woven into the pages. But the final chapter may hold secrets darker and more threatening than anyone anticipated.
An unputdownable, twisty thriller, The Final Chapter asks us: how well do we really know our closest friends? And how well do we know ourselves?
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Everett, a pen name for crime novelist Martyn Waites (the Tom Killgannon Mysteries), delivers a slyly entertaining metafictional mystery. Ten years ago, handsome literary wunderkind Jonathan Durward seemed to vanish into thin air, and all efforts to find him have come up empty. When a new Durward manuscript for a novel titled Russian Doll arrives at his publisher's offices, they're overjoyed by the opportunity to cash in on his still-popular name. Everett, a writer and former friend of the author, is asked to annotate and edit the work. He agrees, and is slightly horrified to find that the new book is an espionage tale focusing on a British government assassin rather than the highbrow work on which Durward built his reputation. Each of Durward's action-packed chapters is followed by lengthy notes from Everett that tie incidents in the novel to those in the authors' lives and brood on the vagaries of the publishing industry. As Everett reads the manuscript, he becomes increasingly convinced that Durward has embedded messages in the text for him to find and decipher. The Nabokovian conceit goes off the rails somewhat in the muddled finale, but Everett gets plenty of points for playfulness. Adventurous mystery fans are likely to enjoy this one.
