Beth

Twenty years ago Madeline Barker's father disappeared. Despite what everyone else thinks, Madeline's convinced her stepfamily had nothing to do with it. But the recent discovery of his car finally proves he didn't just drive away. Worse, the police find something in the trunk that says there's more to this case than murder.

When the National Security Agency’s invincible code-breaking machine encounters a mysterious code it cannot break, the agency calls its head cryptographer, Susan Fletcher, a brilliant, beautiful mathematician. What she uncovers sends shock waves through the corridors of power. The NSA is being held hostage…not by guns or bombs but by a code so complex that if released would cripple U.S. intelligence. Caught in an accelerating tempest of secrecy and lies, Fletcher battles to save the agency she believes in.

Inventive and uniquely original novelist Jasper Fforde sends his literary sleuth on another wildly imaginative journey through time and literature. Thursday Next faces a sinister global multinational corporation represented by Mr. Schitt-Hawse, beats the magistrate from Kafka's The Trial at his own game, and trains for her next assignment by apprenticing herself to Miss Havisham. Thursday then accepts the ultimate challenge: capture Acheron Hades, the murderer of characters from the classics.

Great Britain, circa 1985: time travel is routine, and literature is taken very, very seriously. England is a virtual police state where an aunt can get lost (literally) in a Wordsworth poem and forging Byronic verse is a punishable offense. All this is business as usual for Thursday Next, Special Operative in literary detection. But when someone begins kidnapping characters from works of literature and plucks Jane Eyre from the pages of Bronte's novel, Thursday is faced with the challenge of her career.