Stone's Fall

In his most dazzling novel since the groundbreaking New York Times bestseller An Instance of the Fingerpost, Pears presents a vast historical mystery, marvelous in its ambition and ingenious in its complexity. At his London home, John Stone falls out of a window to his death. A financier and arms dealer, Stone was a man so wealthy that he was able to manipulate markets, industries, and indeed entire countries and continents.

Did he jump, was he pushed, or was it merely a tragic accident? His alluring and enigmatic widow hires a young crime reporter to investigate. The story moves backward in time--from London in 1909 to Paris in 1890 and finally to Venice in 1867--and the attempts to uncover the truth play out against the backdrop of the evolution of high-stakes international finance, Europe's first great age of espionage, and the start of the twentieth century's arms race.

Stone's Fall is a tale of love and frailty, as much as it is of high finance and skulduggery. The mixture, then, as now, is an often fatal combination.