Forged in Ink
When a pristine first edition of Audubon's Birds of America lands on his shop counter, antiquarian bookseller Caelin Vesper feels the wrongness in his gut before his mind catches up. The gilt is too bright, the tissue guards too crisp , and hidden inside the binding, a fortune in stolen original plates worth millions. By the time Inspector Maren Holloway comes asking questions, Caelin has already traced the forgery back to a shadowy figure called Erasmus Quill and a network of collectors who use his shop's reputation as a laundering front. Now implicated as the fall guy in a crime that reaches from the auction houses of Europe to the chambers of Senator Aldous Marchetti, Caelin has twenty-four hours to authenticate every clue, decode every forged inscription, and expose the real thieves , or watch Judge Miriam Castellan sentence him for a crime he didn't commit. With each chapter he traces, another name surfaces: Adelaide Marchetti, Felix Ardent, Sabine Calloway, Roland Marsh, Petra Halloran , all connected by the same trembling hand. The ink will either name the guilty... or sign his own death warrant.