A Thief for All Time
A Thief for All Time:
This is a tale of a crime of monumental proportions, spanning four centuries and more. It is certainly the art theft of all time, if not grandest larceny of all time. And unlike in mystery fiction (such as my usual bread-and-butter), the perpetrator got away with it. Not only did he get away with it, but the objects of his theft would make him wealthy; immortalize him; lionize him, and finally elevate him into a deity.
And as in All the President's Men, the key was, as with most crimes apart from murder (and all too often even there), to follow the money.
The charges outlined in this book: A Tiger's Heart (about to be published by my publisher Speaking Volumes) are presented through discovery: little by little through the efforts of my new protagonist Jake Fleming, an investigative journalist for a print newspaper (The San Francisco Tribune, a fictional publication), and thus a member of an endangered species. As too are all such newspapers save The New York Times, The Washington Post, and a few others such as the non-profit Tampa Bay Times (but very few indeed).
A Tiger's Heart will be the first of my new series, The Jake Fleming Investigations. And it is based on factual evidence, which my Jake Fleming will uncover, little by ever-so-little, starting with the murder of a professor friend in London, who was about to publish an explosive new book. His home and office have been trashed, computers destroyed, and all hard drives, flash drives, and USBs either destroyed or stolen. The book has vanished, and the professor's publisher (he's published extensively in his field of Elizabethan History and Literature) has never received a copy. All that remains is a shortlist of ten words or abbreviations found in a jacket pocket.
The late professor's personal assistant is less than helpful, as are his colleagues on campus (he has a scurrilous reputation of sorts, as an outlier) and so Jake is on his own. But not for long. His daughter Melissa, a graduate student at the University of California at Berkeley, has just changed majors from Elizabethan English to Theater and wants to visit London while her father is there, even though it's November and therefore cold and wet. She wants to see the theater district, perhaps even audition in case there's anything brewing, even though it's off-season. And Jake is a pushover, as usual, when it comes to his daughter, partly from guilt, because he'd been abroad on assignment for much of her life, and missed too many key events; and then his wife and Melissa's mother had died of breast cancer two years before, and neither of them was over her yet. Is one ever? He's often wondered.
Melissa arrives in London, and promptly takes over the newspaper's one-bedroom flat on Denmark Street, and endeavors to correct her father's numerous bad habits, particularly his junk food diet (and subsequent ulcer). She also has an ulterior motive of her own: her faculty adviser, an important visiting professor from Oxford, is about to publish a new book of his own, on the Shakespeare Sonnets, and will also be in London. But her advisor seems secretive and advises her not to mention his presence or their relationship, so she communicates with him via text and meets him on the sly.
Jake, in the meantime, has found a nearby bookstore on Charing Cross Road that had been frequented by the late professor, whose proprietor will become an ally in his search for answers. Jake shares the list with the elderly bookseller, who advises him to go to the British Library and gives him a letter of introduction.
The game is afoot.
As Jake slowly, but surely discovers his friend's objective, he finds an ally; then gradually another, then even his skeptic daughter, who'd been educated to believe otherwise, and is adamantly opposed to his discoveries, at first. Then there's an opponent on the faculty who will become an ally, after fierce initial opposition (then a lover, later on). And the discovery of the truth, and the revelation of the true artist of the works in question, will be both monumental, and extremely dangerous. As the murder of the professor foretold.
(Note: a non-fiction companion book will follow the release of the novel; I cannot disclose the title here because it will reveal too much).
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