The Foreign Hand

Sol Brenner has bought and sold books for fifty-two years without once trading abroad. He always said that a man who cannot check a story is a man buying trouble. Now the trouble has found him at his own table.

A Vermont bookseller reports an ordinary mark in an ordinary book: a rubber stamp showing that a small Maine library once withdrew a volume from its shelves. There is only one problem. That library has never withdrawn a book in its hundred-and-seventy-year history - and never could.

A forged stamp that makes an object worth less is the one thing no dealer has ever had a reason to fake.

What Sol uncovers - working backward through dead ends, silent telephones, and one very much alive woman in Liverpool who has been waiting thirty-one years for someone to ask - is not a forgery ring at all. It is something colder: a scheme that used the law itself to turn stolen property into lawfully owned property, in daylight, without a single false word ever committed to paper.

Three hundred and forty books. Eleven institutions robbed and never told. A route so ordinary that the people it protected never had reason to name it - and the people it ruined never knew it existed.

The Foreign Hand is the eleventh novel in The Calder College Mystery Society series.