The Forgers
A Novel
-
- $9.99
-
- $9.99
Publisher Description
A brutal murder incites paranoia in the rare-book world in a “brilliantly written . . . lethally enthralling” novel of literary suspense (Joyce Carol Oates).
The bibliophile community is stunned when a reclusive collector, Adam Diehl, is found on the floor of his Montauk home: hands severed, surrounded by valuable inscribed books and original manuscripts that have been vandalized beyond repair. Adam’s sister, Meghan, and her lover, Will—a convicted if unrepentant literary forger—struggle to come to terms with the incomprehensible murder. But when Will begins receiving threatening handwritten letters, seemingly penned by Henry James and A. Conan Doyle, he’s drawn into a web of deception with which he’s unnervingly familiar. Yet this time, it’s putting his own life in jeopardy.
“From its provocative opening line . . . [The Forgers] takes on a knowing, nourish tone, like a crime movie by the Coen brothers” (The Miami Herald), while “quite skillfully, paying homage to one of Agatha Christie’s most famous whodunits. Yet even then, [Morrow] offers a few twists of his own and will keep all but the most astute mystery aficionado guessing . . . until the end” (The Washington Post).
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Onetime forger Will, the refined if unreliable narrator of this artfully limned suspense novel from Morrow (The Diviner's Tale), gets involved in the macabre mutilation-murder in a Montauk, N.Y., beachfront cottage of his girlfriend Meghan's brother, Adam Diehl, who was, like himself and Meghan, a member an insular circle of rare book aficionados. But as soon as Will starts to discuss the blackmailing missive, written in Henry James's distinctive hand, that undid his career as a forger, one hardly needs to be Sherlock Holmes to deduce that much more is going on than initially meets the eye. Indeed, as the story of tenuously reformed Will's attempt to move forward with a normal life with Meghan unfolds,, the insights that Morrow offers into the lure of collecting, the rush of forgery as a potentially creative act, and underlying questions of authenticity render the whodunit one of the lesser mysteries of this sly puzzler.