The Last Repair

Desmond Okonkwo has spent forty-one years learning not to open things that aren't his to open.

In the last week of June, a parcel arrives at the Brandt Reading Room that breaks the habit of a lifetime: brown paper, a knot he was taught in 1974, and a book that hasn't been touched since the conservator who packed it up died mid-repair, over thirty years ago.

There is no forgery in what he finds. That's the trouble.

Every document the Watermark Consortium turns up is honest - right up until they learn to read the part nobody reads: the grounds. Buried there, for ninety-three years, is a name that was never asked whether it wanted to be used.

As the search moves from invoice books to daybooks to a letter no one thought to send, Des Okonkwo has to answer the question that's been waiting for him since February: whether a repair - the one thing in his trade that's supposed to be reversible - can be made to hold up something that never comes off again.

Nobody is murdered. Nothing is stolen outright. But somewhere in Massachusetts, four hundred and eleven books are still waiting to be checked, and the truth, once found, has nowhere left to go but into the record.

The Last Repair is the fourteenth novel in The Calder College Mystery Society series.