For Nell Young maps are everything. As the daughter of map specialists she was raised among dusty drawers filled with maps, some vividly detailed and some spare and utilitarian. She had hoped to follow in her father’s’ footsteps as a researcher in the Map Room of the New York Public library. But after the Junk Box fiasco she had been fired at the request of her own father.  After that very public humiliating debacle she finally found work at Classics, a personalized map company where you could order a facsimile of an ancient map and then personalize it with dragons or your initials while still maintaining the maps “antique” look. It was a far cry from what Nell had hoped for her career, but at least it was a living. Needless to say, she had not spoken to her father again. And now it is too late, because she has just received word that he was murdered in his office. 

 His office was torn apart, but after going through the mess, the staff found nothing missing. The video of the attack was inconclusive, meaning they could not see how the person who killed her father had gotten into the NYPL, or how they had gotten out. As Nell goes through his desk she finds an old gas station highway map. The same one that she had found in the junk box that led to her firing,  so she begins to investigate. The map is now incredibly rare and valuable due to fact that someone has been tracking down every copy, destroying it and anyone that stands in their way. Her father seems to be just the most recent victim. But why is the map so important? What secrets lie behind it? As Nell begins to dig deeper she soon begins to uncover secrets from her childhood and the death of her mother. But the map also leads her to an incredible discovery that threatens to upend all we know about time, space, and reality.

This was an exciting and interesting thriller. By interspersing what was happening in the present with stories from Nell’s childhood, we begin to see how the past is impacting the future. But we also get to meet an interesting cast of characters who knew Nell as a child and knew her parents as well. Although some parts of the plot seem a bit thin, that was over come by the urgency of finding the answers to the puzzle of the map and by strong character development. Shepherd asks of us is to think deeply about the purpose of maps and in doing so has created a marvelous Schrödinger thought experiment about maps and the reality they show.

Brenda’s Rating: ****( 4 Out of 5 Stars)

Recommend this book to: Marian, Sharon and Keith

Book Study Worthy? yes

Read in e-library format.