Thanks to NetGalley for the ARC. Publication date is September 8, 2020.
On paper, this book is right up my alley. Will, a retired forger, is forced back into crime after 20 years of living peacefully with his wife Meghan and their daughters Nicole and Maisie. Maisie is confronted one night by Will's nemesis, Slader, and shows up back home with a copy of the rarest book in American literature - Edgar Allen Poe's Tamerlane. Under threat of secrets from the past coming to the surface, Will agrees to work with his nemesis and forge a copy of Tamerlane. Sounds like an episode of White Collar (a show which I love) with some The Da Vinci Code / Catch Me if You Can thrown in. However, I found this book to be the furthest thing from the thrilling forgery tale I was expecting.
I want to mention first that this book is, unbeknownst to me, a sequel to The Forgers. Nowhere in the Goodreads page or NetGalley does it list this book as being a sequel. If it was maybe only tangentially related to the first book, that wouldn't be so bad. But from the plot synopsis of The Forgers, it seems like The Forger's Daughter is a direct continuation of the relationships and threats built in the first book. The Forger's Daughter does a good job of recaping the history between Will and Slader and what potential threats Will's family may be facing now. The first 20% or so of the book is this backstory of how Will knows Slader and what Will has been doing these past 20 years. As someone who didn't read the first book, I didn't feel like I was missing out on any details, but I felt a lot of the personality conflicts and character backstory of the characters was lacking and maybe if I had read the first book, I would have had a better idea of who these characters were. I did appreciate not being left in the dark on any of the more pertinent details even if the recapping was a bit slow at times and I just wanted to get back to present day where this mysterious package was just dropped off.
My favorite thing about this book was the amount of detail that went into the history of these various famous books. Unless Morrow is an avid bibliophile, a whole lot of research went into this book and it paid off. I loved how easily the facts and stories of different authors and their works flowed out of Will and how convincing the writing was that Will loves these books and documents. The writing in these sections was absolutely wonderful and reminded me of The Da Vinci Code when Robert Langdon would similarly go into these long explanation of the history and backstory of the different works he encounters. There's a real reverence that comes through in Will's character that really enhances the overall tone of the book and I can't emphasize how much I loved it.
My first, and probably largest complaint, is the character development (or lack thereof) of Meghan. The book is split between alternating chapters of her and Will's POV. While I got a really good sense of Will's character, his motivations, and his thought process for his decisions, I could not tell you one of those same aspects about Meghan. About halfway through the book, there's an event that happens that is related to Slader. Now Meghan knows who Will is, who Slader is, she knows the general story of their past and relationship, and she knows about the current forgery project. So I have no idea why she didn't tell Will about the event she witnessed. She does eventually tell Will and the reason she hid it gets hand-waved away in the last few pages of the book. In my opinion, she had no real point of being in the book other than to have a different character to be doing stuff while Will was working on the forgery in the other room. And that 'doing stuff' was running errands or picking vegetables out of the garden. If all of her chapters were deleted, the book would be half as long and twice as good.
Another major complaint I had was the general lack of agency that Will seemed to have. Based on the summary, I expected Will would have to go out and find the materials in order to forge this document. However, Slader gives him everything he needs and gives him a somewhat shorter time table than he would like but the document gets finished on time just fine. Then, in the third act, Will gets surprised with how the document gets back in his hands, but he seems to just shrug it off and go with the flow. It felt like there were 2 Wills in the book. The first was the knowledgeable forger who has a love for old manuscripts and the second was just a cog in the forging machine and didn't have much personality. I had such a hard time seeing these two as the same person. In the forging process, I was much more interested in Will's daughter Nicole. Afterall, with a title like The Forger's Daughter, I expected her character to be a bit more developed than it was. But she also took some agency away from Will by just telling him that she was coming with him a few different times when he went out to various meetings. And although Will does protest a tiny bit, he generally just shrugs it off again and takes her with him.
Finally, the ending to this book is fantastic but comes a little out of left field. The last 5% or so of the book has 10 times the suspense and action that the rest of the book does. The ending also does a lot of heavy lifting in regards to characterization. I really think if the climax of the ending was maybe moved to the first third of the book and the rest of the book would be characters dealing with the fall out of that decision, the overall story would be so much more engaging.
288 pages
Interesting premise with some good characters and a solid ending, but overall an underwhelming read.
Thanks again to NetGalley
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