Pitch for a “Matthew Pearl-style” novel: After Danielle Steel’s death in 2015, her youngest son finds an unpublished manuscript among her effects. Rather than being one of her trademark romance novels, the book exhibits a complex and disjointed plot realized through the first-person accounts of several different Habsburgian villagers at the outset of the Thirty Years War. There are chapter-long digressions into pre-Heideggerian Continental philosophy, extensive footnotes, and a penchant for untranslated German-language poetry. Soon after the book is made known to the public, both the son and the manuscript disappear, and the fate of Steel’s family and the future of American literature are left to the detective... More >>>