Perspective (Cross and Vance Novel Book 4)

The most dangerous book in the world is a list of true names. Four hundred people are alive because nobody has read it.

For forty years, the finest maker of false identities of his generation built new people for the hunted: witnesses, defectors, women who needed to stop existing before Thursday. He died in 2005 on his own stairs, of an ordinary heart, and he took his trade with him. He did not take his records. Somewhere he kept a register of every true name under every false one he ever sold, and this winter it surfaces.

It is in a blue house by a lake, in the possession of an eighty-one-year-old woman who has guarded it for twenty years and is dying in April. She will hand it to exactly one person, and she is not selling. She is choosing. Everyone who wants it has to sit in her kitchen and eat cake and be read like a page, and so far every one of them has asked her the wrong question.

They are all coming anyway. A coalition of quiet men whose own names are in that book and who will not sleep until it is ash. A ruined reader named Adrian Vey, hunted himself, who needs to sell it to buy his life back. A county registrar who drove twelve hundred miles on nothing but a hunch and eleven notebooks. And a forger and his wife, who arrive performing the end of their marriage, because the fastest way into a closed county is two people who are no longer speaking.

The estrangement is tradecraft. The four words they pass in public are a cipher. Everything else about them is the only true thing either has ever owned, and the woman in the blue house can see straight through all of it. Cross and Vance came to save four hundred strangers. What they find is the beginning of their marriage.

PERSPECTIVE is the fourth Cross and Vance novel: literary thrillers about art, money, marriage, and the gray seam where all three meet. For readers of David Baldacci, John Grisham, and Daniel Silva.