Bradford Morrow

From critically acclaimed novelist Bradford Morrow comes a richly told literary thriller about the dark side of the rare book world. The bibliophile community is stunned when a reclusive rare book collector is found on the floor of his Montauk home: hands severed, surrounded by valuable inscribed books and manuscripts that have been vandalized beyond repair. In the weeks following the victim’s death, his sister, Meghan, and her lover—a sometime literary forger whose specialty is the handwriting of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle—struggle to come to terms with the murder. The police fail to identify a likely suspect, and the case quickly turns cold. Soon, Meghan’s lover begins to receive threatening handwritten letters, ostensibly penned by long-dead authors but really from someone who seems to have disturbing insights into Adam’s death. Understanding that his own life is in jeopardy, he attempts to forge a new beginning for himself and Meghan. But he may not be able to escape his vengeful stalker.

Music and war, war and music—these are the twin motifs around which Bradford Morrow, recipient of the Academy Award in Fiction from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, has composed his magnum opus, a novel more than a dozen years in the making.In the early days of the new millennium, pages of a worn and weathered original sonata manuscript—the gift of a Czech immigrant living out her final days in Queens—come into the hands of Meta Taverner, a young musicologist whose concert piano career was cut short by an injury. To Meta's eye, it appears to be an authentic eighteenth-century work; to her discerning ear, the music rendered there is commanding, hauntingly beautiful, clearly the undiscovered composition of a master. But there is no indication of who the composer might be. The gift comes with the request that Meta attempt to find the manuscript's true owner—a Prague friend the old woman has not heard from since they were forced apart by the Second World War—and to make the three-part sonata whole again. Leaving New York behind for the land of Dvorák and Kafka, Meta sets out on an unforgettable search to locate the remaining movements of the sonata and uncover a story that has influenced the course of many lives, even as it becomes clear that she isn't the only one after the music's secrets.