rob i n w asser man

Chapter Sample
 Secrets.

Codes.

One Girl
Who Holds
the Key.

When the night began, Nora had two best friends and
one true love. When it ended, she had nothing but
blood on her hands, and a scream ringing in
her head.

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 1
I should probably start with the blood.
If it bleeds it leads and all that, right? It’s all anyone ever
wants to know about, anyway. What did it look like? What did it
feel like? Why was it all over my hands? And the mystery blood,
all those unaccounted-­​for antibodies, those faceless corkscrews of
DNA—­​who left them behind?
But beginning with that night, with the blood, means that
Chris will never be anything more than a corpse, bleeding out all
over his mother’s travertine marble, Adriane nothing but a dead-­​
eyed head case, rocking and moaning, her clothes soaked in his
blood, her face paper white with that slash of red razored into her
cheek. If I started there, Max would be nothing but a void. Null
space; vacuum and wind.
Maybe that part would be right.
But not the rest of it. Because that wasn’t the beginning, any
more than it was the end. It was—­​note the brilliant deductive rea-
soning at work here—­​the middle. The center of gravity around
which we all spiraled, but none of us could see. The center cannot
hold, Max liked to say, back when things were new and quoting
poetry seemed a suitably ironic way to declare our love. Things
fall apart.
But things don’t just fall apart. People break them.




2
2 In the beginning was the Book.
“Seven hundred years old.” The Hoff slammed it down so
hard the table rattled. “Imagine that.”
Apparently noting our lack of awe, he dropped a liver-­​spotted­
fist onto the book with nearly as much force. “Do so now.” He
swiveled his head to glare at each of us in turn, neck veins bulg-
ing with the effort. “Close your eyes. Imagine a scribe in a dark,
windowless room. Imagine his quill, scratching across the page,
transcribing his secrets—­​his God, his magic, his power, his blood.
Imagine, for just one moment, that you will be the one to reach
across the ages and make this manuscript yield its treasure.” He
drew a baby-­​blue handkerchief from his breast pocket and hocked
a thick wad of phlegm into its center. “Imagine what it might be
like if your sad, small lives were actually worth something.”
I closed my eyes, as ordered. And imagined, in glorious detail,
the tortures I would impose on Chris as soon as we escaped from
this musty dungeon of mad professors and ancient books.
“Trust me,” Chris had said, promising me a genial old man
with twinkling grandfather eyes and a Santa laugh. The Hoff
was, according to Chris, a bearded marshmallow, hovering on the
verge of senility, with little inclination to force his research assis-
tants to show up on time, or, for the most part, show up at all.
This was supposed to be my senior-­​year gift to myself, a thrice-­​
weekly escape from the ever-constricting halls of Chapman Prep
into the absentminded bosom of ivy-­​covered academia, a string
of lazy afternoons complete with snacking, lounging, and the oc-
casional nap. Not to mention, Chris had pointed out as my pen
hovered over the registration form, “the opportunity to spend
quality time with your all-­​time favorite person, otherwise known
as me.” Not that this was in short supply, as his freshman dorm 

was about a hundred yards from my high school locker. The only 
problem with the dorm was having to put up with the presence of 
3
his roommate, who resolutely kept himself on his side of the room
while keeping his owlish eyes on us.
And now that same roommate stared at me from across the
table, the final member of “our intrepid archival team.” Another
detail Chris had conveniently neglected to mention. Chris assured
me that Max didn’t intend to be creepy, and was, when no one
else was watching, almost normal. But then, Chris liked everyone.
And his credibility was slipping by the minute.
The Hoff—­​Chris had coined the nickname last year, when
he’d been the one whiling away his senior year with the get-­​out-­​
of-­​
jail-­​
free pass commonly known as supervised independent
study—­​passed around the Book. “Decades’ worth of experts have
tried to crack the code,” he said as we flipped through page af-
ter page of incomprehensible symbols. More than two hundred
pages of them, broken only by elaborate illustrations of flowers
and animals and astronomical phenomena that apparently had
no counterparts in the real world. “Historians, cryptographers,
mathematicians, the NSA’s best code breakers gave it all they had,
but the Voynich manuscript refused to yield. Mr. Lewis!”
We all flinched. The Hoff snarled, revealing a mouthful of jag-
ged teeth, sharp as fangs and—­​judging from his expression—­​soon
to be applied to a similar purpose. “That is not how one handles a
valuable book.”
Max, who had been rifling through the pages like it was a
flip-­​book, rested his hands flat on the table. Behind his glasses,
his eyes were wide. “Sorry,” he said quietly. Aside from the soft
“Hi” I’d gotten when we were introduced, it was the first time I’d
heard him speak.
I cleared my throat. “It’s not a valuable book,” I told the Hoff.
 “It’s a copy of a valuable book. If he ruined it, I’m sure he could

 scrounge up the twenty bucks to pay you back.”
 The real thing, with its crumbling seven-­​hundred-­​year-­​old
4
pages and fading seven-­​ hundred-­​ year-­​
old ink, was safely en-
sconced in a Yale library, eighty miles to the south, where faculty
didn’t have to settle for high-­​school-­​age researchers or cheap fac-
similes. The Hoff closed his eyes for a moment, and I suspected
he was putting his own imagination to the test, pretending away
whatever scandal had stripped him of his Harvard tenure and
dumped him here to rot at a third-­​rate college in a third-­​rate col-
lege town for the rest of his academic life.
Thanks, Max mouthed, an instant before the Hoff opened his
eyes and resumed his glare.
“All books are valuable,” the professor said. But he didn’t
press it.
I decided the roommate wasn’t so bad when he smiled.
The meeting lasted for another hour, but the Hoff gave up
on his dreamlike rambling and instead stuck to logistics, explain-
ing his significant research and our minimal—­​“but absolutely
essential!”—­​part in it. He’d just weaseled a collection of letters
out of some wealthy widow, and was convinced they contained
the secret to decoding the Book. (It was always the Book when
he spoke of it, capital B implicit in the hushed voice, and we fol-
lowed suit, ironically at first, then later out of habit and grudging
respect.) Max and Chris would be put to work indexing and trans-
lating the bulk of the collection, searching for clues. I, on the other
hand, was assigned a “special” project all my own.
“Most of the letters are written by Edward Kelley,” the Hoff
explained. “Personal alchemist to the Holy Roman emperor. Many
believe he authored the Book himself. But I believe his contribu-
tion is both lesser and greater. I think he got his hands on it, and
solved it. And now we will follow in his footsteps.” He pointed at 

me. “Ms. Kane.” 
“Nora,” I said. 
5
“Ms. Kane, you will deal with the letters written by Kelley’s
daughter, Elizabeth Weston, which seem to have found their way
into the collection by mistake. I doubt they contain anything of
use, but nonetheless, we must be thorough.”
Unbelievable. I could translate twice as fast and three times
as accurately as Chris could, and if the Hoff had even bothered to
glance at my Latin teacher’s recommendation, he’d know it. “Is
this because I’m a woman?”
Chris snorted.
“I can take the Elizabeth letters if Nora doesn’t want them,”
Max said. “It’s okay with me.”
Thank you, I would have liked to mouth, returning the favor,
but the Hoff was watching. And his face was a storm cloud. “I
mind. This kind of work requires a certain . . . ​maturity. Eliza-
beth’s letters will give Ms. Kane ample practice in historical trans-
lation while the two of you help me with the real search.”
Admittedly, if you’d asked me five minutes earlier, I would
have said I didn’t care whether I was translating important let-
ters, pointless letters, or a sixteenth-­​century grocery list. But then
the Hoff opened his big, fat, sexist, ageist—­​whatever -ist was con-
scribing me to uselessness—­​mouth.
“So it’s because I’m in high school?” I added. “You know, it’s
not fair to judge me based on—­​”
“Do you want to be a member of this team or not, Ms. Kane?”
I could have enlightened him on the difference between want
and need, as in wanting to be at Adriane’s house mopping up her
latest micro-­​drama, or in Chris’s dorm room watching TV (or at
least trying to, while pretending not to notice Chris and Adriane
 making out behind me and Max doing his spook stare from across

 the room), basically wanting to be anywhere else, but needing the
 credits for graduation and the bullet point for my college applica-
6
tions.
“I do, Professor Hoffpauer.”
“Good.” He stood up and, with stiff, awkward contortions,
folded himself into a bulky wool topcoat. “The collection will be
waiting here for you tomorrow afternoon. Christopher has a key
to the office and will show you proper document-­​handling pro-
tocol.”
“The archive’s not being housed in the rare-­​books library?”
Max asked.
“As if I’d let that harpy get her hands on these?” the Hoff said.
He narrowed his eyes. “Not a word to her about this. Or to any-
one, for that matter. I won’t have someone taking this away from
me. They’re everywhere, you know.”
“Who?” Max asked. Chris just shook his head, knowing b ­ etter.
“Young man—­​ ” The Hoff lowered his voice and leaned
­toward Max, casting a shadow across the Book. “You don’t want
to know.”
It was a close call, but we managed to hold our laughter until
he was out of the room.

3
It’s funny how one thing leads you to another, and another, u ­ ntil
you end up in the exact place you’re not supposed to be. If it
weren’t for Chris, I’d never have ended up in the Hoff’s lair, fac-
ing down the Book; if it weren’t for Chapman Prep, there would
have been no Chris, or at least no Chris-­​and-­​me. And if it weren’t
for “wild delinquent Andy Kane” getting wasted, stealing a
car, and plowing it into a tree with “much-­​beloved local beauty
­ atherine Li” and, “in one tragic moment,” turning them both
C 

into drunken roadkill (reportage courtesy of that bastion of objec- 
tivity, the Chapman Courier), I’d never have set foot in Chapman 
7
Prep. Put another way: If my brother had managed to keep his
hands off Catherine Li, Catherine Li’s booze, and Catherine Li’s
father’s Mercedes, Chris probably wouldn’t be dead.
Funny.

4
Chris is dead.
It’s ridiculously easy to forget. Or at least to imagine away.
Sometimes, at least.

5
Until the September I turned fifteen—­​the September I enrolled
in Chapman Prep—­​my life could be divided pretty neatly into
two eras. Before Dead Brother; After Dead Brother. BDB, I was
the youngest in a family of four, father a Latin professor, mother a
part-­​time bookstore manager, both of them teetering on the edge
of divorce but sticking together, in that noble tradition of post-­​
boomer bourgeoisie, for the kids. ADB, there were still four of us,
it was just that one—­​the only one anyone cared about anymore—­​
happened to be dead.
Not that my parents went crazy. No alcoholism, no untouch-
able shrines, no unused place settings at the dinner table, no for-
tunes spent on séances and psychic hotlines, and definitely no
elaborate gothic madness of ghostly hallucinations, midnight
keening, bumps in the night, or any of that. There was the time, a
few months after it happened, that my mother took the pills. But
we don’t talk about that.
 No, for the lion’s share of ADB, we were a resolutely normal

 family without even the expected residual dusting of crazy. We
 visited his grave with appropriate frequency. We repurposed his
8
room within an appropriate number of months. We reminisced
with an appropriate level of misty-­​eyed regret. And we didn’t talk
about the time with the pills, any more than we talked about my
father losing his job because he refused to leave the house or my
mother transforming herself into an administrative assistant, the
only one in the state of Massachusetts who worked twenty-­​four
hours a day, because apparently even typing up loan applications
for an obese bank manager who liked to play secretarial grab-­​
and-­​seek was preferable to being home. ADB, I got extremely pro-
ficient in listening at doorways, which is the only way I learned
about the third mortgage they’d taken on the house. It confirmed
my suspicions: BDB, they may have been staying together for
the sake of the children, but ADB, they were staying together for
Andy. More specifically, for the dead Andy who lived in the stucco
walls he’d scratched with his sixth-grade bike and the hardwood
floors he’d mutilated with his third-grade candle-­​making kit, and
every other scuff, wound, and scar fifteen years of casual destruc-
tion had left behind. Imminent bankruptcy and domestic discord
or not, neither doting parent would ever leave him behind. I came
along with the package.
As much fun as it was at home ADB, school was even better.
Under the best of circumstances, middle school is a sixth-­​circle-­​
of-­​hell situation, sandwiched somewhere between flaming tombs
and flesh-­​eating harpies. It’s the kind of situation that doesn’t
need gasoline on the fire, especially when said gasoline comes in
the form of your older brother murdering the older sister of the
third-most popular girl in school. Jenna Li’s grief was glamorous.
She was a glossy-­​eyed tragic figure, a damsel in distress with girls
fighting over who got to stroke her hair and hold her hand and
ply her with comfortingly double-­​stuffed Oreos. Whereas I didn’t 

cry, I didn’t have silky hair, and my brother was a murderer. A 
drunken idiot of a murderer who wasn’t around to blame. It 
9
didn’t exactly boost me up the social ladder.
Only one constant spanned the chasm between the two eras,
and that was Latin. Other five-­​years-­​olds practiced piano or took
ballet; I memorized declensions and recited mnemonics. Andy re-
belled when he was nine and forged our parents’ signatures on
the permission slip for after-­​school soccer, but I played the good
girl and went along with it, three afternoons a week, amo, amas,
amat. Whether because I liked the attention, because I was too
big a wuss to say no, or because I couldn’t resist the opportunity
to make my brother look bad, I don’t remember. But it certainly
wasn’t because I liked Latin.
Then Andrew did his thing. And my father stopped leaving
the house. Stopped, for the most part, leaving his office, where he
hypothetically was burrowed in with nebulous translation projects
but was more frequently—­​we knew but never a­ cknowledged—­​
doing­crossword puzzles, ignoring bills, or cradling his head in
his hands and staring sightlessly at the family photo on the corner
of his desk. He rarely came out and even more rarely let us in,
but the door still opened for Latin lessons, and, for that one hour
a day, three times a week, the invisible man became visible—­​or
maybe I became invisible, and therefore tolerable. We hunched
over the translations, speaking of nothing but a tricky indicative
or an ablative that should have been locative, and sometimes, es-
pecially when I got good enough to race him to the answer and
occasionally win, he rested a hand on my shoulder.
It would have been pathetic if I’d stuck with it just to wring
a few drops of parenting from dear old absentee dad, and so I
told myself it had nothing to do with him, or us, or Andy, who
watched all our lessons from that photo on the corner of the desk,
 his smugly upturned lip seeming to say that he knew what I was

 doing, even if I wouldn’t admit it. I told myself it was the lan-
 guage that drew me in, the satisfaction of arranging words like
10
mathematical constructs, adding and subtracting until a solution
dropped out. Self-­​delusion or not, it stuck. Latin became my ref-
uge, until the September I turned fifteen, the September I woke
up and found myself the same age as my older brother, when it
became my salvation.

6
Chapman is still authentically small-town enough to have a right
and wrong side of the tracks, although in this case, the tracks are a
Walmart. Our house, along with the cheap gas station, the check-­​
cashing depot, and the so-­​called park, which had more used con-
doms and broken meth pipes than it did trees, lay on the southern
side. Chapman Prep—­​a palatial stone idyll adjacent to the college
campus and in easy walking distance of two Italy-­​certified gela-
teria, three high-­​end stationery stores, four yuppie baby-­​clothes
outposts, and a candle-­​making shoppe with twice-­​daily do-­​it-­​
yourself demonstrations in the back—­​was comfortably ensconced
in the north. And never the twain would have met, were it not for
the application I sent for in desperation, the scholarship for l­ocal
students with excessive need, and Latin placement test scores
that—­​I found out later—­​had the classics teacher drooling all over
his copy of the Aeneid and the dean of discipline convinced I’d
found a way to scrawl the contents of a Latin-­​English dictionary
on the bottom of my Converse. The acceptance arrived in April,
the scholarship money landed in July, and in September my par-
ents pretended to be proud as I headed out for my first day as a
Chapman Prep sophomore.
So I was the new girl, at a school where there hadn’t been a
new girl in two years, and that went about how you’d expect. 

Fortunately I wasn’t in the market for friends. All I’d wanted was 
a place where no one knew me and no one knew Andy—­​which 
11
might have been why, during the first obligatory small-­​talk ex-
change with a girl in my chem class, I said I was an only child.
It just popped out.
I saw my mother hit with it once, not long after it happened.
Just some guy in line at the bank, trying to be polite. “How many
children do you have?” For a few seconds, my mother did her
fish-­​mouth thing—­​open shut open—­​and then the tears started
leaking out. The guy felt so guilty he offered my mother a job, and
the rest is secretarial history.
I didn’t cry. I smiled at the blond girl whose name I couldn’t
remember and said, “No sisters, no brothers, just me,” and then
she started complaining about her twin baby sisters and their ten-
dency to drool all over her homework, and that was the end of it.
People don’t ask questions because they care about the answers.
They’re only talking to fill up the silence.
I didn’t notice the guy sitting at the lab table behind us—­​
which is to say, I noticed him, because even on day one it was
clear this was the kind of guy you noticed, but I didn’t notice he
was listening.
I noticed him again, shadowing me in the hall as I tried to
find my way from chemistry to Latin, and then again, passing into
the classroom in step with me and grabbing a seat next to mine.
Admittedly, the odds were working in my favor on this front,
since the loose semicircle contained only five chairs, but the rest
were empty, so he could have sat anywhere. It required conscious
and vaguely incomprehensible effort to plant himself next to the
new girl with cheap jeans, a pancake chest, and hair that defied
any description but mousy brown. I told myself I deserved some
good luck, overlooking the fact that it would call for substantially
 more than luck to thrust me into one of those narratives where

 plain-­​Jane new girl catches the eye of inexplicably single Prince
 Charming, because somehow the new school has revealed her
12
wild, irresistible beauty, of which she was never before aware.
Spoiler alert: Chris had a girlfriend. An endless string of them,
in fact. Which I guessed from the way he leaned back in his chair,
slinging a long arm over the empty one next door, the posture of
a guy who’s used to having someone to hold on to. So I adjusted
the fairy tale to accommodate a damaged Prince Charming who
distracted himself from his pain by dating girls unworthy of him,
unconsciously reserving himself for his true love and savior—
namely, me—­​and smiled.
“Nora, right?” he said.
I nodded. His eyes were a deep brown, several shades darker
than his face, and I suspected they’d be well suited to the purpose
of gazing lovingly, if, hypothetically, such a need ever came up.
“Andrew Kane’s sister?”
I stopped smiling.
“Chris.” He tapped his chest, then waited, as if he’d forgotten
his line and was expecting me to fill it in for him. When I didn’t, he
added, “Chris Moore? JFK Middle? I was in sixth when you were
in fifth.” He paused again. “Andy helped coach my soccer team.”
I made a noise, a hmm or an um, and wondered how long I
could keep from having to respond. I remembered him now,
dimly, as one of the many to make out with Jenna Li behind the
cafeteria, and it seemed suddenly possible that she’d spread her
minions across the globe—­​or at least the town—­​with orders to
deliver her revenge.
“He was cool,” Chris said. Then, “Sorry. About what hap-
pened. That must have sucked.”
Another hmm.
“I moved cross town that year,” he said. “That’s probably why
you don’t remember me. Been at Prep ever since. So what do you 

think of it so far?” 
I shrugged. 
13
“Hey. Listen. It’s probably none of my business, but . . .”
I steeled myself.
“I heard what you said to Julianne.” He must have caught my
brow furrow at the name. “In chem class?” he added. “When she
asked about brothers or ­sisters? That’s when I recognized you.
And you told her . . .” He hesitated, picking at the stiff cuff of his
button-­​down shirt, preppy even for Prep. “Actually, I was right
the first time. None of my business.” He reached out a hand. “Bet-
ter idea. New school, new start, right? Meeting again for the first
time. Chris Moore.”
I took his hand, shaking it firmly. “Nora Kane.”
We were still locked together when a ridiculously pretty
girl—­​long black hair, almond-­​shaped eyes, long legs jutting from
a short skirt, the works—­​danced through the door, dropped to
her knees before us, and propped her elbows on Chris’s desk. “So,
what are we talking about?”
“Filling New Girl in on the highs and lows of life at Prep,”
Chris said. I realized I’d been holding my breath. But he passed
the test. “I warned her there’s still time to go back where she came
from, but she refuses to listen. You want to tell her?”
The girl laughed. “I think you’ve just met the low.” She gave
Chris the kind of light shove you deploy when you’re looking for
an excuse to touch someone. “Now meet the high.”
I’d never understood girls like her—­​as in, literally couldn’t
comprehend how they achieved perfection by seven a.m., hair sleek
and dry, lip gloss and mascara and foundation and the variety of
cosmetics of whose existence I remained unaware masterfully ap-
plied, accessories matched to sartorial selection matched to freshly
polished nails. Whereas I inevitably showed up to school late, with
 tangled, wet, and, several months of the year, frozen hair tucked

 into a lopsided bun, my socks mismatched, and, on truly special
 occasions, some hastily applied drugstore foundation that couldn’t
14
disguise the fact that my nose was slightly too big for my face. My
mother had once thought it would be comforting to explain that
beauty—­​and the grace and confidence that nurture it—­​requires
money. She added no maternal assurances about natural beauty,
true beauty, or inner beauty and which, if any, I might possess,
while I elected not to point out that money wasn’t the only thing I
didn’t have. A mother who bothered to show me how to put on eye
shadow might also have come in handy.
“Adriane Ames,” Chris said as the remaining two students fil-
tered into the classroom and grabbed seats. “Feel free to disregard
ninety percent of everything she says.”
“And the other ten?” I asked.
“Pure genius. Or so she tells me.”
“I also tell him to get a haircut,” she said, brushing manicured
fingers across the tight curls that were blossoming into an Afro.
“But does he listen?”
I liked his hair. “Clearly that fell into the ninety percent,” I
said. “The odds really aren’t in your favor.”
She laughed again, a surprisingly abrasive sound for such a
delicate frame. Her voice was musical, but her laugh was pure
noise. “She’s cute,” Adriane said. “Can we keep her?”
They could; they did.

7
Chris never told anyone about Andy, and neither did I. As if
knowing that he knew meant I could pretend it had never hap-
pened, because it wasn’t really lying if Chris knew the truth.
He wasn’t with Adriane, not then. But he was at the top of her
agenda and, as quickly became clear, items on the agenda never 

lay fallow for long. It turned out he was the reason she’d taken 
advanced Latin in the first place; I was the reason she passed it. 
15
That’s where it happened, somewhere in between declensions and
Lucretian soliloquies and cheesy “Ancient Romans Go to Market”
skits, Chris and I fell in like, and Chris and Adriane—­​with my
Cyranoesque assistance—­​fell in love. So I had a best friend and
soon, by virtue of the transitive property of social addition (girl
has best friend plus best friend has new girlfriend equals girl has
new best friend, quod erat demonstrandum), I had two. Chris and
I got Adriane through advanced Latin, Adriane and I got Chris
through remedial chem, the two of them got me through the new-­​
girl phase with a minimum of muss and fuss, and for two years
we were, if no happier than the average high school student jug-
gling APs and SATs and extracurriculars and defective parents,
at least not miserable, and not alone. Then Chris went to college
(albeit, via the path of least resistance, down the street), I found
Max, we all found the Book, and everything went to hell.
 this is a borzoi book published by alfred a. knopf

This is a work of fiction. All incidents and dialogue, and all characters with the exception of some
well-­​known historical and public figures, are products of the author’s imagination and are not to
be construed as real. Where real-­​life historical or public figures appear, the situations, incidents,
and dialogues concerning those persons are fictional and are not intended to depict actual events
or to change the fictional nature of the work. In all other respects, any resemblance to persons
living or dead is entirely coincidental.

Text copyright © 2012 by Robin Wasserman

Jacket art copyright © 2012 by Elle Moss/Trevillion Images
Interior art courtesy of the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University

All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, an imprint of Random
House Children’s Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

Grateful acknowledgment is made to Susan Reynolds for permission to reprint her previously
published translation of the poetry of Elizabeth Jane Weston.

Grateful acknowledgment is made to Indiana University Press for permission to reprint an

excerpt from Petrarch: The Canzoniere, translated by Mark Musa, copyright © 1996 by Mark Musa.
All rights reserved. Reprinted by permission of Indiana University Press.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-­​in-­​Publication Data

Wasserman, Robin.
The book of blood and shadow / by Robin Wasserman. — 1st ed.
p. cm.
Summary: While working on a project translating letters from sixteenth-­​century Prague, high
school senior Nora Kane discovers her best friend murdered, with her boyfriend the apparent
killer, and is caught up in a dangerous web of secret societies and shadowy conspirators, all
searching for a mysterious ancient device purported to allow direct communication with God.
ISBN 978-­​0-­​375-­​86876-­​4 (trade) — ISBN 978-­​0-­​375-­​96876-­​1 (lib. bdg.) —
ISBN 978-­​0-­​375-­​87277-­​8 (tr. pbk.) — ISBN 978-­​0-­​375-­​89961-­​4 (ebook)
[1. Mystery and detective stories. 2. Supernatural—­​Fiction. 3. Secret societies—­​Fiction.
4. Conspiracies—­​Fiction. 5. Murder—­​Fiction. 6. Prague (Czech Republic)—­​Fiction.
7. Czech Republic—­​Fiction.]  I. Title.
PZ7.W25865Bo 2012
[Fic]—­​dc22
2011003920

The text of this book is set in 10.5-­point Palatino.

Printed in the United States of America

April 2012
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First Edition

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