The Plot

Jacob Finch Bonner published a respectable first novel years ago. Now he teaches at a third-rate MFA program, with little self-respect left and nothing decent written in years. His most arrogant student, Evan Parker, announces that Jake's guidance is unnecessary, since the book he is working on has a plot that cannot fail.

Jake expects the usual amateur boasting, until he hears the plot. Evan's novel never appears. When Jake learns that the young man has died without finishing it, he decides the story is too good to waste and tells it himself.

A few years on, Jake is rich, famous and read around the world, and everything Evan predicted has come true for him instead. Then an anonymous e-mail arrives with a short accusation: thief. More messages follow, a campaign of menace from someone who knows.

Jake has to work out who is behind it while keeping the truth from his readers and his publishers. He starts digging into Evan's life and finds out things that both amaze and frighten him. The questions are who Evan really was, where the idea came from, and who stole it from whom.

The book is a literary thriller about the writing world, told from Jake's side, with a slow tightening of pressure as his secret comes under threat.