Stone's Fall

The long-awaited return of one of our greatest historical thriller writers. A book to rival his international bestseller An Instance of the Fingerpost.

In his most dazzling and brilliant novel since An Instance of the Fingerpost, Iain Pears tells the story of John Stone, financier and armaments manufacturer, a man so wealthy that in the years before World War One he was able to manipulate markets, industries and indeed whole 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 goes backwards – London in 1909, then Paris in 1890, and finally Venice in 1867 – and Stone’s character and motivation deepen as the book progresses; in the first part he is almost an abstraction, existing only in the memory of those who knew him; in the second he is a character, but only a secondary one; in the third he is the narrator of the story. A quest, then, but also a love story and a murder mystery, set against the backdrop of the evolution of high-stakes international finance, Europe’s first great age of espionage and the start of the twentieth century’s arms race. Like Fingerpost, Stone’s Fall is an intricate and richly satisfying puzzle, completely engaging on many levels, a triumphant return for one of the world’s great storytellers.

Author Profile

Iain Pears was born in 1955. He is the author of seven detective novels, a book of art history and countless articles on artistic, financial and historical subjects, and three novels, An Instance of the Fingerpost, The Dream of Scipio and The Portrait.

Reviews

Fireworks, inventiveness and excitement of part three and a curmudgeonly inventor of torpedoes,an indefatigably clever storyteller…witty, laconic dialogue; a galloping pace, particularly in the first and third narratives; the author’s silky, fluid prose; and above all the concluding passages, which detonate a series of surprises as poignant as they are grim,The novel is above all a romp, albeit an exceptionally intelligent and entertaining one,Pears has the good journalist’s knack of making high finance enthralling – he can take Robert Peston’s job any day – but it is his interest in the peculiar effects that money has on human beings that makes him a good novelist.,absorbing and also timely,this thoughtful, thoroughly satisfying novel… clever storytelling to reach imaginative heights,Iain Pears has an uncanny historical sense … splendid return to the grand 19th-century novel,Engrossing and intelligent, it’s the best sort of page-turner.,Pears is in a class of his own; no one else could possibly succeed in making the world of big finance so hugely entertaining.