The Authenticator

THE AUTHENTICATORNora Quinn has spent eleven years in a basement lab catching liars who have been dead for a hundred years. She has never met one who might still be alive.When a client brings her a box of forty-one letters, signed by a woman who supposedly drowned in 1968, Nora expects the usual: a hopeful forgery, a sentimental fake, an easy answer. Instead she finds paper that's right. Ink that's right. A hand that never wavers.And one word, buried in a sentence about roses, that shouldn't exist yet.The deeper Nora tests the letters, the less they behave like a hoax and the more they behave like a woman who spent forty years making sure no one ever found her - until now. Every fiber, every watermark, every trace of ink pulls Nora further from her lab and closer to a name written in pencil and rubbed almost to nothing: two initials her own father has been keeping locked away for twenty-two years.Some documents tell you what happened. This one is about to tell Nora what her family has been hiding.A novel about the lies we authenticate and the ones we live inside. Perfect for readers of Kate Morton, Ruth Ware, and Anthony Doerr. A novel where the past never stays as buried as everyone needs it to be.