Responding to a cryptic summons to a remote country house, London bookseller Isaac Inchbold finds himself responsible for restoring a magnificent library pillaged during the English Civil War, and in the process slipping from the surface of 1660s London into an underworld of spies and smugglers, ciphers and forgeries. As he assembles the fragments of a complex historical mystery, Inchbold learns how Sir Ambrose Plessington, founder of the library, escaped from Bohemia on the eve of the Thirty Years War with plunder from the Imperial Library. Inchbold's hunt for one of these stolen volumes - a lost Hermetic text - soon casts him into an elaborate intrigue; his fortunes hang on the discovery of the missing manuscript but his search reveals that the elusive volume is not what it seems and that he has been made an unwitting player in a treacherous game.

Ross King is the author of the highly praisedMichelangelo and the Pope's CeilingandBrunelleschi's Dome, a celebrated account of how the Renaissance architect Brunelleschi constructed the dome of Santa Maria del Fiore in Florence. He has also written two novels,DominoandEx Libris. He lives in Oxford.

Following the huge success of Brunelleschi's Dome and Michelangelo and the Pope's Ceiling, Vintage re-issue Ross King's two fantastic historical crime novels, Ex Libris and Domino, with a sumptuous new jacket treatment. Irresistible.