An Instance of the Fingerpost by Iain Pears

In 1663 Oxford, a servant girl confesses to a murder. But four witnesses--a medical student, the son of a traitor, a cryptographer, and an archivist--each finger a different culprit...

REVIEW

"It is 1663, and England is wracked with intrigue and civil strife. When an Oxford don is murdered, it seems at first that the incident can have nothing to do with great matters of church and state....Yet, little is as it seems in this gripping novel, which dramatizes the ways in which witnesses can see the same events yet remember them falsely. Each of four narrators—a Venetian medical student, a young man intent on proving his late father innocent of treason, a cryptographer, and an archivist—fingers a different culprit...an erudite and entertaining tour de force." —People

If you liked Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose, you should run to buy Iain Pears’s lavishly erudite historical mystery.” —The New York Times
 
“Fascinating…quite extraordinary…elevates the murder mystery to the category of high art.” —Los Angeles
 
“Extraordinary…this thriller brings not merely a huge cast of characters but a whole century vividly to life.” —Newsweek
 
“[A] novel that will have you sitting up all night and calling in sick the next day.  It’s that hard to put down.” —Houston Chronicle
 
“Enthralling.” —San Francisco Chronicle Book Review

PRODUCT DETAILS
Trade Paperback
Publisher: Riverhead Books
ISBN: 978-1573227957
Pages: 704