Stone's Fall »

Like his popular art history mysteries, Iain Pears s erudite historical novels are as well researched and intricately plotted as they are suspenseful and colorful. With 1998's The Instance of the Fingerpost, his first break from the art-centered Jonathan Argyll series, Pears evoked the most rapturous praise of his career.

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...

The Barnes & Noble Review

Iain Pears's literary gift lies in zipping around history and arranging smackdowns between different paradigms of reality and their incommensurable versions of truth and moral value. That should be enough to make your heart pound, but to ensure it, he jazzes up the contests with murder and mysterious death. An Instance of the Fingerpost, Pears's most famous performance, is a truly ingenious tour de force set in 17th-century England -- itself a milieu whose like, for untrammeled intellectual, political, and cosmological commotion, we'll not see again. Now we have Stone's Fall, another slugfest of ideas with a baffling death at its center, this one embellished by a growing constellation of murders surrounding it.