When a scream shatters the summer night outside their country house in the Hudson Valley, reformed literary forger Will and his wife find their daughter Maisie bloodied, holding a parcel her attacker demanded she present to her father. Inside is a literary rarity the likes of which few have ever handled, part of a plot to counterfeit the rarest book in American literature: Edgar Allan Poe's first, Tamerlane. Facing threats to his life and family, coerced by his former nemesis and fellow forger Henry Slader, Will must rely on the artistic skills of his older daughter Nicole to help create a flawless forgery of this Holy Grail of American letters.