The Second Issue

Vivian Crewe spent thirty-five years learning how objects tell the truth. At seventy-one, she knows what happens when a lie is written down carefully enough that it stops sounding like one.

A university library asks her to examine its celebrated first-issue copy of Owen Cadell's The Quarry - the rarest state of a beloved American classic, insured for a small fortune, cited in a dozen scholarly articles, authenticated for sixty years against the standard bibliography of Cadell's work. It should be an afternoon's job. Nobody has ever thought to check the bibliography itself.

Somebody built the rarity to order.

What Vivian and her ensemble of specialists uncover is not a forged book but a forged fact: three "issue points," fabricated in 1961 by a scholar under quiet pressure from the man funding his work, describing a first state that never physically existed - and copies, made to match the description, that have been circulating and appreciating ever since. To prove it, they will need the one thing no one has ever thought worth keeping: an ordinary, unloved, two-hundred-dollar copy that nobody wanted enough to touch.

The Crewe Concordance gains its fourth category. And for the first time, an outside institution cites it by name.

The Second Issue is the fourth novel in The Calder College Mystery Society series.