The Holloway Manuscript

When rare book dealer Iris Castellan is called to appraise the estate of recently deceased literary scholar Edmund Holloway, she expects dusty first editions and overdue library fines. What she finds instead is a locked room, a body that shouldn't be there, and a manuscript that doesn't exist.

The manuscript — 412 pages of dense, handwritten prose — appears to be an unpublished novel by Daphne du Maurier, written sometime between "Rebecca" and "My Cousin Rachel." It would be the literary discovery of the century, worth millions. But there's a problem: the paper is modern, the ink is fresh, and the handwriting, while a perfect match for du Maurier's, was written by someone who died in 1989.

The body in the locked room belongs to Holloway's research assistant, a young woman named Clara Voss, who had been dead for approximately twelve hours before anyone noticed. The police call it a heart attack. Iris doesn't believe in heart attacks that happen in locked rooms full of impossible manuscripts.

As Iris digs deeper, she discovers that Holloway was part of a secret circle of literary forgers — not criminals selling fakes, but obsessives who believed that certain unwritten books existed in some Platonic ideal and could be "channeled" through sufficient study of an author's mind. They called themselves the Scribes, and they had been operating for forty years.

Now someone is killing the Scribes, one by one, and the Holloway Manuscript may be either the motive or the murder weapon. In a world where the line between authentic and counterfeit blurs beyond recognition, Iris must determine what's real — the book, the killer, or her own understanding of truth.