The Grand Complication The Grand Complication

The Grand Complication, a stunning and suspenseful novel by the author of the critically acclaimed international bestseller A Case of Curiosities, is narrated by Alexander Short, a stylish young reference librarian of arcane interests. With his job in jeopardy and his marriage coming unhinged, Alexander finds odd solace in the notebook he keeps tethered to his jacket.

Enter the improbably named Henry James Jesson III, a bibliophile who hires the librarian for some after-hours research. The task: to render whole an incomplete cabinet of wonders chronicling the life of a mysterious eighteenth-century inventor.

As the investigation heats up, Alexander realizes there are many more secrets lurking in Jesson‘s cloistered world than those found inside his elegant Manhattan town house. A delicious compendium of quirky colleagues, erotic pop-ups, deviant passions, and miraculous examples of theft, the book is a grand and complicated “timepiece,” told with a devilish sense of fun.

This background displays a variant of Pitman shorthand popularized by the librarian Melvil Dewey. The gear that appears at the bottom of the text is a freehand rendering of an escapement wheel contained inside the “Marie Antoinette,” a pocket watch masterpiece designed by Abraham Louis Breguet. The whereabouts of the watch, stolen from a Jerusalem museum in 1983, is unknown.