Stone's Fall - by Iain Pears (Paperback)

About the Book

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.

Book Synopsis

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.

Review Quotes

"When I read Iain Pears' An Instance of the Fingerpost years ago, I thought it was so brilliantly plotted, so compulsively entertaining, so utterly engrossing that I gave it to my father and said, 'This is the new Dickens.' Stone's Fall is better."--Malcolm Gladwell

"Mr. Pears's assured command of period history, language, lore, and attitudes is formidable."-The Wall Street Journal

About the Author

Iain Pears is the author of the bestsellers An Instance of the Fingerpost and The Dream of Scipio and a novella, The Portrait, as well as a series of acclaimed detective novels, a book of art history and countless articles on artistic, financial and historical subjects. He lives in Oxford, England.