Literary forger Henry Slader, assaulted and presumed dead by his longtime nemesis, Will, awakens in a shallow grave. Concussed and disoriented, Slader exhumes himself and sets out to exact revenge on his rival, orchestrate Will’s downfall and make a fortune along the way --- armed with a devastating secret about Will’s past. Slader quickly draws in Will’s daughter, Nicole, wielding his threats against her father to blackmail her into forging inscriptions by such authors as Poe, Hemingway, James Joyce and Gertrude Stein. As Nicole’s skill grows, so does her devotion to her father’s integrity, until she commits the ultimate betrayal for the sake of his freedom. With breathtakingly precise background knowledge and virtuoso execution, Nicole forges a suite of brilliantly convincing and surpassingly valuable letters by FRANKENSTEIN author Mary Shelley --- planting within them the seeds of Slader’s doom.

When a scream shatters the summer night outside their country house in the Hudson Valley, reformed literary forger Will and his wife Meghan find their daughter Maisie shaken and bloodied, holding a parcel her attacker demanded she present to her father. Inside is a literary rarity the likes of which few have ever handled, and a letter laying out impossible demands regarding its future. After 20 years of living life on the straight and narrow, Will finds himself drawn back to forgery, ensnared in a plot to counterfeit the rarest book in American literature: Edgar Allan Poe’s first, TAMERLANE, of which only a dozen copies are known to have survived. Until now.

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. 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 the Second World War forced them apart --- and to make the three-part sonata whole again. Leaving New York behind for the land of Dvořák 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.

The rare book world is stunned when a reclusive collector, Adam Diehl, is found on the floor of his home with his hands severed. Adam’s sister, Meghan, and her lover, Will --- a convicted if unrepentant literary forger --- struggle to come to terms with the seemingly incomprehensible murder. But when Will begins receiving threatening handwritten letters, he understands that his own life is also on the line --- and attempts to forge a new beginning for himself and Meg.