The Book of Mirrors by E. O. Chirovici

Author:E. O. Chirovici
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Atria/Emily Bestler Books

A half hour later, as I was entering the tunnel, thinking about my talk with Laura Baines, I suddenly remembered the detail that had eluded me on that first evening after I’d begun to research the Wieder case: the book the professor was working on at the time, which was going to be published a few months later. As Richard said in his manuscript, Laura Baines believed that it’d rock the world of science. A “bombshell,” as Sam would have said.

But when I’d tried to look it up on Amazon and on other sites that listed the professor’s works, there was no mention of it. The last book Wieder had published was a 110-page study on artificial intelligence released by Princeton University Press in 1986, over a year before he was murdered. Wieder told Richard that he’d already signed a publishing contract for the book he was working on, stirring rumors among his colleagues. So Wieder had already sent the manuscript or a proposal to the publisher before his death, and might have received at least part of an advance. Why, then, was the book never published?

There were two possible explanations, I figured.

The first would be that his editor changed his mind and decided not to publish the manuscript. That was unlikely, given that there was a contract, and the mystery surrounding the professor’s violent death would probably have boosted sales, cynically speaking. Only some kind of forceful intervention would have made a publisher abandon a project like that. An intervention made by whom? And what did that manuscript contain? Was it linked in any way to the secret research Wieder had been working on? Was he intending to reveal details about it in his new book?

Another possibility was that the executor of Wieder’s will—from the newspapers, I’d gathered that there had been a will and that he’d left everything to his sister, Inge—had opposed publication of the book and had been able to muster the necessary legal arguments. I knew that I ought to try to speak to Inge, although she’d settled in Italy many years previously and probably didn’t know very much about what had happened at the time of the murder.

I turned onto Valley Road, made a left down Witherspoon Street, and soon arrived at Rockdale Lane, where Derek Simmons and his partner lived, not far from the Princeton police station. I arrived earlier than I’d expected, so I parked next to a school and went into a nearby café, where, over a cup of coffee, I tried to put the new leads that had cropped up in my investigation in order. The more I thought about the professor’s book, the more intrigued I was by the fact that it had never been published.

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