It took a while to get into this book. It’s third person past tense and uses the past perfect a lot. Not my preffered narrative form. But after the past perfect was dropped, it got easier to read.

Eve Brook is hired as manuscript doctor for a biography on an Elizabethan hero. First, she has to find the manuscript. The author is dead and his widow doesn’t have it (or care where it’s gone off too). Eve sets out of a quest to find the missing manuscript. After a few meetings with people who might know more, I started to wonder: why bother? The author doesn’t seem to have been a pleasant man to be around and the biography would probably be more of a coat rack for his anti-woke world view, than an honest biography of Philip Sidney. I believe Eve would have a hard time sloughing herself through that manuscript.

It seems, though, there is no manuscript. Hurray for that. Then Eve is asked it arrange the memorial service for the author. And she decides to accept.

I decided I had read enough. Arranging events is not her usual job and she neither knew nor liked the man. She decided to accept because it would give her another chance to talk to the people the author left behind.

I don’t want to know.

I read an ARC through NetGalley.