The Peculiar Inheritance of Mortimer Underbough

Mortimer Underbough has spent his life folding correspondence in proper triplicate. So when a thick, cream-colored envelope sealed with a geometric eye arrives between a memo about inkwell requisitions and a circular on departmental folding, he knows something has gone terribly, interestingly wrong. He has been named the sole heir of Great-Aunt Edna, a woman whose existence his family has long refused to discuss. Executor Pell delivers the news alongside a will riddled with impossible clauses, a trout that sighs warnings into the parlor air, and a Very Tall Man whose silence speaks volumes. As Mortimer is drawn through the wrong sort of door, he is pursued by a faceless tax inspector who claims jurisdiction over the living and the dead, interrogated by the meticulous Adjudicator Vex, and stalked by three identical gentlemen whose paperwork is always in perfect order. To claim his inheritance, Mortimer must decode Edna's letters, appease the sighing trout, outwit the paper clerk, and survive Cedric Flack, a rival claimant armed with a well-dressed woman and a bureaucrat in an impossibly large hat. With twenty villagers watching his every misstep and the Slowline passengers whispering of his doom, Mortimer discovers that Edna's peculiar legacy is not gold or land, but a choice. And every choice, like every stamp, leaves a mark that cannot be unfolded.