THE STAVROS MANUSCRIPT

A brilliant linguist desperately struggles to decipher an ancient book in Wheeler’s novel.

Leonard Stavros is impossibly talented when it comes to languages—he can speak 21 with perfect fluency, and is comfortable translating many more. A linguist and mathematician by training, he leaves the halls of academia to become a cryptographer for a “shadowy” government agency and is recruited to break the dense code of the Paisley Codex, a 700-year-old handwritten manuscript housed at the library of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences that likely dates back to the 14th century. Despite his indefatigable efforts, he makes no progress, and his obsession devours him—he spends nine years attempting to crack the book’s code, and in the process loses his wife, his career, and all of his money, absorbed by a desperate fixation deftly conveyed by the author. The man who commissions the codebreaking, referred to only as the Judge, accuses him of stealing the manuscript (his reprobate roommate, Ed, is actually the responsible party), and Leonard comes to suspect that Ed is in possession of the actual original rather than a copy. As the intrigue thickens, Leonard begins a romantic relationship with a waitress, Nina Benesova, a younger woman with an extraordinary head for numbers who almost pathologically counts the objects of the world (“The words spoken under her breath as I had led her from the scene of Ed’s attack—she had not been saying a prayer at all; she had been counting steps”). This is a delightfully strange book; the plot is wildly implausible, laced with supernatural elements, but delivered in a captivatingly fantastical way that is wholly mesmerizing. Wheeler slowly reveals the true nature of the manuscript in question, crafting a thrilling mystery within a tender love story. This is a fascinatingly peculiar book, entertaining and unpredictable.

A wonderfully strange and engrossing thriller.