The Forger's Daughter by Bradford Morrow

Published by Grove Atlanti/Mysterious Press on September 8, 2020

The Forger’s Daughter is a sequel to Bradford Morrow's The Forgers. Like the novel it follows, The Forger’s Daughter is a literary suspense novel. Since the relevant plot details of The Forgers are scattered through the sequel, it isn’t necessary to read the first novel to appreciate the second. While there is always some benefit to reading the first novel before reading the sequel, The Forger’s Daughter can be read as a standalone.

Will is no longer a forger. Instead, he works for an auction house, offering opinions about the authenticity of signatures. His wife owns a bookshop that specializes in rare books. His daughter Nicole has learned his skills as a forger, although she devotes her talent to assisting Will with the letterpress shop he operates. Will and Meghan have adopted a child named Maise whose true heritage is known to Meghan but not to Will.

In the first novel, a villain named Slader robbed Will of three fingers. Slader returns to blackmail Will with pictures that purport to show a crime that Will committed in the first novel. Slader has stolen a rare edition of Poe’s Tamberlane. He wants Will to replicate it so that the original can be replaced with a forged copy. The plan calls for Will to then alter the original a bit, to add Poe’s signature. and to forge an accompanying letter asking a reviewer to read it. Will agrees not just to avoid exposure but because of an implied threat that Maisie will be harmed if he refuses.

Will and Meghan narrate The Forger’s Daughter in alternating chapters. They tell their stories in the same voice, a fact that isn’t troublesome, given that both are well educated devotees of literature and are thus likely to share an elegant narrative style.

The two novels are something of an homage to Poe, particularly drawing uppon “The Purloined Letter,” a story in which the story’s hero, Auguste Dupin, creates a forgery. Apart from educating the reader with Poe lore, the novel offers some tips in the art of literary fakery, adding both interest and authenticity to the narrative.

The element of suspense in The Forger’s Daughter is low key. In fact, the novel as a whole might be characterized as low energy. It never creates the strong sense that anything bad will happen to anyone, apart from a cat that goes missing for a while. The characters, good and bad, are all very civilized, perhaps too well bred to behave violently, notwithstanding Slader’s amputation of Will’s fingers in the earlier book. Even when a moment of violence does arrive, the act is low key, the sort of thing that might be followed by a cup of tea (actually, it’s followed by a fine wine).

The novel’s value is found in its characterizations and prose more than its plot, and perhaps for its insights, some purloined from Poe. The ending of the sequel creates a pleasant symmetry between the two novels. The Forger’s Daughter tells an interesting story rather than a memorable one, but Morrow tells it very well.

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The Diviner's Tale by Bradford Morrow

Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt on January 20, 2011

Bradford Morrow is an excellent writer, one whose style I greatly admire. In The Diviner's Tale, he brings a literary sensibility to what is essentially a genre novel ... although defining the genre is difficult. The Diviner's Tale is story of the supernatural that has elements of a thriller and the flavor of a family saga. Unfortunately, as much as I enjoyed Morrow's prose, I couldn't get excited about the story. The key problem, I think, is that the story is told in the first person by a narrator who has such a depressed, lackadaisical attitude toward life that her indifference rubs off on the reader.

Cassandra inherits the familial talent for divining, but when she foresees her brother's death, her father (without judgment) proclaims her a witch. Years later, Cassandra begins to doubt her own mind when, while walking a field in search of hidden water, she finds a dead girl hanging from a tree -- only to discover, when returning with the sheriff, that the body has vanished (and with it, all evidence of its existence). A series of creepy events unfold; Cassandra sees ominous people who could be real or imagined, living or dead, while receiving warnings (decidedly real) that she doesn't understand. She tries to hide for awhile, but how does one hide from visions (if that's what they are)? Eventually (roughly at the novel's midpoint) she decides to investigate. Several chapters later, the story evolves into a deeper mystery concerning missing children. While that development breathed some needed life into the story, it left me wondering why it took more than two hundred pages for that essential slice of drama to manifest itself.

Divining becomes a metaphor for seeing things that others can't -- not just underground water or dead people but troubled souls and hidden truths. One of the book's goals, I think, is to illustrate something that Cassandra says about her family: "All we had ever been were stories, and saying ourselves, unveiling our stories, was the best, the only, chance at divining ourselves." As Cassandra reflects upon her life, she discusses the sort of difficulties that regularly arise in lives both real and fictional -- illness and loss, abuse, uncertain relationships and unexpected pregnancy -- problems so familiar that Morrow's treatment of them here feels stale, as if we've heard it all before. Moreover, as the book begins to alternate Cassandra's unhappy memories with her problematic present, the memories tend to dominate the narrative -- an unfortunate choice on Morrow's part, since the present threat is much more intriguing than Cassandra's bleak past.

Ultimately, I found the story interesting but not compelling. The mystery that finally emerges isn't very mysterious. Some of the interaction between Cassandra and her children seemed forced, the dialog inauthentic. Despite the fact that Cassandra tells her story in the first person, it seems cold and distant, as if she is describing emotions she didn't actually feel. That made it difficult to connect with the narrative. Still, while I was less than captivated by the story, I found it easy to keep reading. Morrow's writing style kept my eyes moving from sentence to sentence, caught up in the graceful flow of words. The novel's doesn't have the kind of plot twist ending that thrillers and mysteries often deliver; that just isn't the kind of novel Morrow wanted to write. That's fine, but the lackluster ending didn't help the novel. This isn't a bad effort, but it's not my favorite Morrow.

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