Monograph And Murder

MONOGRAPH AND MURDER POE BAXTER BOOKS BOOK 4 ACF BOOKENS CONTENTS Chapter 1 Chapter 2 Chapter 3 Chapter 4 Chapter 5 Chapter 6 Chapter 7 Chapter 8 Chapter 9 Chapter 10 Chapter 11 Chapter 12 A FREE Cozy set in San Francisco Also by ACF Bookens About the Author 1 When planning one’s world tour, I would not recommend traveling from almost the Arctic Circle to the tip of the African Continent. The changes in temperature alone will shock you. When we had left Reykjavik, the temperature had been somewhere around twenty-five degrees; in Capetown, it had been temperate, even chilly; and now, here in Damascus, almost a full twenty-four hours later, it was almost eighty degrees. My body did not like this massive change, and she was showing her displeasure by making me so tired I could barely walk. I couldn’t blame the weather completely, though. We’d had a wild time in South Africa, and now, here we were in the cosmopolitan city of Damascus, half a world away, on the search for a first century codex that any collector of ancient manuscripts would want to find. Our new jobs had us spinning—around the world, it seemed. Our boss Boone had given me a write-up on the scroll to read on the flight, and saying I was intrigued would be an understatement. But sometimes, even curiosity couldn’t trump exhaustion, and I’d drooled on his shoulder for most of the flight. Once we landed, the combination of fatigue, the change in weather, and excitement made me anxious and edgy. What I really needed was a full day’s sleep in an air-conditioned room under a soft blanket. Instead, I got a dusty ride in a Jeep, with no doors or windows, to meet our client after just disembarking from the plane. “Seriously, we can’t even shower and change,” said my best friend, Beattie, as she sat with her six-foot-five-inch frame scrunched into the Jeep beside me. “I’m absolutely certain I smell.” I glanced over at my friend, who had never once had BO in her life, even during puberty, and smiled in a way I hoped she felt was comforting. I knew her request was more about changing clothes than about showers. As a very tall woman, her cropped pants and spaghetti-strap tank top showed a lot of skin. Damascus was a modern city, but even here, most women covered up more and were much shorter than Beattie. “We don’t have time to go back. Our contact wants to meet immediately,” Boone said. “Here, use this,” he said, handing her his button-down shirt. I winked at him, feeling a little brazen with this new man I was seeing and knowing he was smart enough to know Beattie’s real concern. She slipped the men’s business shirt on and rolled the sleeves slightly. Boone was shorter but broader in the shoulders than she was, so it worked . . . if she didn’t button it. She’d just have to be okay with her ankles showing for a while longer. I had managed to plan ahead a bit more because of a heads-up from Boone and was in a long-sleeved linen shirt and a long skirt that reached the top of my sandals. It was an outfit I would have worn in the summer back home in Virginia, and while I wasn’t thrilled about it being almost eighty in November, I was glad to feel comfortable in my clothes. “Tell us about the buyer,” Beattie shouted as our friend Frank dodged a pothole in the middle of the small road he was taking to our destination. “What do we need to know?” Boone turned sideways to look back toward us from the front seat and said, “You two are buyers from the US. Your covers are intact from Reykjavik, so we’ll use those. The codex is, as you know, a very rare first-century text in Hebrew. It’s considered a mythic text though some might say Apocryphal since it’s reported to contain stories of Jesus as a boy.” I shook my head. “This isn’t really our area of expertise, Boone. I’m a fairy-tale scholar, and Beattie specializes in Victorian literature.” He knew all of this, but my nerves and exhaustion were getting the better of me, and I really didn’t want to negotiate for a potentially stolen religious manuscript that was sure to upset many of the world’s Christians. “Surely someone else is better equipped.” “Not for this kind of negotiation,” Boone said, holding my gaze. “You and Beattie have proven yourself to be wise and savvy negotiators when it comes to stolen books. There just aren’t any two people as prepared as you are.” He looked over to Beattie and then back to me. “Including me.” I didn’t believe that for a second. Boone was basically a non-governmental spy. He worked with governments to recover stolen manuscripts, and while he wasn’t trained about books beyond what he’d learned on his job, he knew more about most of the world’s rarest tomes than even my Uncle Fitz did, which was saying something because Fitz knew more than anyone else I’d ever met. Still, I understood that Boone was also fairly recognizable in the book world these days, so he’d had to recruit new experts to his team. And sadly, despite the work of feminism, people the world over still seemed to underestimate two women. We’d capitalized on the patriarchy several times in our previous cases, and I wondered if we’d be called to do so again. Now, though, I found myself distracted by our location. We’d left the city center of Damascus and were moving into what I thought of as the suburbs, where the buildings got smaller and the people more curious. I supposed it wasn’t typical to see a Jeep with five white people riding through a Syrian neighborhood, and when two of those people were huge, very muscular men, I imagined the scene was even more disconcerting. Ivan was in the back