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    The Book of the Lion
    The Book of the Lion
    The Book of the Lion
    Ebook56 pages43 minutes

    The Book of the Lion

    By Thomas Perry

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    About this ebook

    A long lost manuscript by Geoffrey Chaucer draws Professor Dominic Hallkyn through the streets of Boston and into a mysterious plot.

    When Professor Dominic Hallkyn receives an anonymous phone call late one night from a voice claiming to possess a priceless Chaucerian manuscript presumed lost forever, he doesn’t know how to react. He soon finds himself scrambling to meet the caller’s demands amid uncompromising suspense that culminates in a devilish plot twist. Perry takes his readers on a mad dash through the winding streets of Boston in pursuit of the unique artifact that may be doomed to disappear from history . . . this time, for good.

    The Bibliomysteries are a series of short tales about deadly books, by top mystery authors.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherMysteriousPress.com Open Road
    Release dateJul 14, 2015
    ISBN9781497649934
    The Book of the Lion
    Author

    Thomas Perry

    Thomas Perry is the New York Times bestselling author of nearly thirty novels, including the critically acclaimed Jane Whitefield series, The Old Man, and The Butcher's Boy, which won the Edgar Award. He lives in Southern California. Follow Thomas on Facebook at @ThomasPerryAuthor.

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      Book preview

      The Book of the Lion - Thomas Perry

      Dominic Hallkyn played back the voicemail on his telephone while he took off his sport coat and hung it up to dry in the laundry room. The smell of rain on tweed was one that he knew some people might say was his smell, the smell of an English professor. The coats—tweed or finer-spun wool in the winter and seersucker or summer-weight fabrics in the late spring and early fall—were his work uniform, no different from a mechanic’s coveralls. He wore them to repel the skepticism of the young.

      The first couple of calls were routine: a girl in his undergraduate medieval lit course had been sick, so could she please hand her paper in tomorrow? Of course. He had plenty of others to deaden his soul until that one arrived. Meg Stanley, the Department Chair, wanted him to serve on a Ph.D. oral exam committee. Unfortunately, he would. Reading the frantically scribbled preliminary exam and then asking probing questions in the oral would be torment to him and the student, both of them joined in a ritual of distaste and humiliation, all of it designed to punish them both for their love of literature, but it was part of his job.

      The last call was not routine. Professor Hallkyn. I know you are considered one of the two or three best living experts on medieval English literature. In spite of Hallkyn’s contempt for academics who fancied themselves the best or the most famous, he was irritated at the two or three. The two were Hallkyn, and Bethune, who was at Harvard. Who did this man think was the third? So when he heard the next sentence, he was already in a bad humor. "I have The Book of the Lion. It’s written in a fine court hand on thin vellum, legible in its entirety. I will be in touch."

      Hallkyn could feel his heart pounding in his chest, and yet he felt light-headed, as though he were being strangled. He realized after a moment that he had forgotten to breathe, and he placed both palms on the table to hold himself up while he corrected the oversight, taking a few deep breaths while he thought. Of course it was a hoax. Nobody could have The Book of the Lion.

      The book didn’t exist except as a reference in Chaucer’s Retraction at the end of The Parson’s Tale, where he listed all of his greatest works by name: "The Book of Troilus; also The Book of Fame; The Book of the Five and Twenty Ladies; The Book of the Duchesse; The Book of Seint Valentynes Day of the Parlement of Briddes; The Tales of Canterbury (thilke that sownen into synne); The Book of the Leoun; and many another book (if they were in my remembrance) and many a song and many a leccherous lay—that Crist for his grete mercy foryeve me the synne."

      Those colleagues who took the retraction seriously had always amused Dominic Hallkyn. He couldn’t fathom how they could profess to know Chaucer and not notice that he had a wicked sense of irony. The Retraction wasn’t a confession. It was an advertisement.

      The thought brought him back to the tantalizing nature of what he had just heard. In his Retraction, Chaucer did not list everything he had written. He listed only masterworks. He listed only those poems that six centuries later still made up a fair portion of the reason that anyone cared about Middle English literature. He listed them in an order ascending to his sublime achievement, The Canterbury Tales. And then,

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