Now in trade, the New York Times bestseller that "may well be the best 'historical mystery' ever written." (The Sunday Boston Globe)

"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

"Enthralling."-San Francisco Chronicle Book Review

"Ingenious."-The Philadelphia Inquirer

"Successful literary thrillers in the mold of Umberto Eco's The Name of the Rose are the stuff of a publisher's dreams, and in Pears' novel they may have found a near-perfect example of the genre...Pears, with a painstaking, almost forensic attention to detail, constructs his world like a master painter..."-New York Times

"Fascinating...quite extraordinary...elevates the murder mystery to the category of high art."-Los Angeles Times Book Review

"Brings not merely a huge cast of characters but a whole century vividly to life."-Newsweek...

A return to the form that launched Iain Pears onto bestseller lists around the world: a vast historical mystery, marvelous in its ambition and ingenius in its complexity.

In his most dazzling novel since the groundbreaking New York Times bestseller An Instance of the Fingerpost, Iain Pears tells the story of John Stone, financier and arms dealer, a man so wealthy that in the years before World War One he was able to manipulate markets, industries, and indeed entire countries and continents.

A panoramic novel with a riveting mystery at its heart, Stone’s Fall is a quest to discover how and why John Stone dies, falling out of a window at his London home.

Chronologically, it moves backwards–from London in 1909 to Paris in 1890, and finally to Venice in 1867– and in the process the quest to uncover the truth plays 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.

Like Fingerpost, Stone’s Fall is an intricately plotted and richly satisfying puzzle–an erudite work of history and fiction that feels utterly true and oddly timely–and marks the triumphant return of one of the world’s great storytellers....

General Bottando can't believe his rotten luck. He has just been promoted--to a position that's heavy on bureaucratic duties-but disturbingly light on investigative responsibilities. As if that wasn't annoying enough, he's received a tip about a planned raid at a nearby monastery. He's relying on his colleague Flavia di Stefano and her art-expert fiancé, Jonathan Argyll, to thwart the plot-but both are beyond baffled. The only valuable item in the monastery's art collection is a supposed Caravaggio that's currently being restored. There are no solid suspects-unless you count the endearing art thief, the flagrantly flamboyant "Rottweiler of Restoration," and the strangely shady icon expert. And there's really no reason to cause an unholy uproar-until someone commits an unconscionable crime......

A tour de force in the tradition of Iain Pears’ international bestseller, An Instance of the Fingerpost, Stone’s Fall weaves a story of love and high finance into the fabric of a page-turning thriller. A novel to stand alongside Atonement and The Remains of the Day.

A panoramic novel with a riveting mystery at its heart, Stone’s Fall is a quest, a love story, and a tale of murder – richly satisfying and completely engaging on many levels. It centres on the career of a very wealthy financier and the mysterious circumstances of his death, cast against the backdrop of WWI and Europe’s first great age of espionage, the evolution of high-stakes international finance and the beginning of the twentieth century’s arms race. Stone’s Fall is a major return to the thriller form that first launched Iain Pears onto bestseller lists around the world and that earned him acclaim as a mesmerizing storyteller....

From internationally bestselling author Iain Pears comes the seventh in his Jonathan Argyll series -- an intriguing mystery of love, loss, and artistic license.

For newlywed and Italian art theft squad head Flavia di Stefano, the honeymoon is over when a painting, borrowed from the Louvre and en route to a celebratory exhibition, is stolen. Desperate to avoid public embarrassment -- and to avoid paying a ransom -- the Italian prime minister leans hard on Flavia to get it back quickly and quietly.

Across town, her husband, art historian Jonathan Argyll, begins an investigation of his own, tracing the past of a small Renaissance painting -- an Immaculate Conception -- owned by Flavia's mentor, retired general Taddeo Bottando. Soon both husband and wife uncover astonishing and chilling secrets, and Flavia's investigation takes a sudden turn from the search for an art thief to the hunt for a murderer....

A return to the form that launched Iain Pears onto bestseller lists around the world: a vast historical mystery, marvelous in its ambition and ingenius in its complexity.

In his most dazzling novel since the groundbreaking New York Times bestseller An Instance of the Fingerpost, Iain Pears tells the story of John Stone, financier and arms dealer, a man so wealthy that in the years before World War One he was able to manipulate markets, industries, and indeed entire countries and continents.

A panoramic novel with a riveting mystery at its heart, Stone’s Fall is a quest to discover how and why John Stone dies, falling out of a window at his London home.

Chronologically, it moves backwards–from London in 1909 to Paris in 1890, and finally to Venice in 1867– and in the process the quest to uncover the truth plays 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.

Like Fingerpost, Stone’s Fall is an intricately plotted and richly satisfying puzzle–an erudite work of history and fiction that feels utterly true and oddly timely–and marks the triumphant return of one of the world’s great storytellers....

Three interlocking worlds. Four people looking for answers. April, 1960: In the cellar of a professor's house in Oxford, fifteen-year-old Rosie goes in search of a missing cat - and instead finds herself in a different world. Anterwold is a sun-drenched world of storytellers and prophecies. But is this world real - and what happens if Rosie decides to stay? Meanwhile, a rebellious scientist is trying to prove that time does not even exist - with potentially devastating consequences. As the three worlds come together, one question arises: who controls the future - or the past?...