The Inspector touches the terminals, jolts as the dead woman’s mind settles over her own: Diana Hunter, deceased. What is the flavour of her life? Sixty-one years of age, divorced, no children. Educated at Madrigal Academy and then Bristol University. By profession an administrator, and then later a writer of obscurantist magical realist novels, she was apparently once celebrated, then reclusive, then forgotten. Most successful book: The Mad Cartographer’s Garden, in which the reader is invited to untangle not only the puzzle that confronts the protagonists but also a separate one allegedly hidden in the text like a sort of enormous crossword clue; most famous arguably the last, titled Quaerendo Invenietis , which received only a very limited publication and became an urban legend of sorts, with the usual associated curiosities. Quaerendo contains secret truths that are downright dangerous to the mind, or an actual working spell, or the soul of an angel, or Hunter’s own, and the act of reading it in the right place at the right time will bring about the end of the world, or possibly the beginning, or will unleash ancient gods from their prison. First-year university students in the humanities pore over the accessible fragments and consider they are touching some fatal cosmic revelation. Copies of the book, of which only one hundred were printed, are now almost impossibly expensive, and Hunter somehow contrived to extract from each purchaser a commitment not to scan any part of what they had, with the result that even now there is no online edition, and indeed no verifiable text at all.