When his brother removes the sought-after volume, Alex notices what appears to be a safe cut into the wall and extracts a small volume, obviously antiquarian. Alex believes the book to be quite rare and arranges to consult a friend, Diana Boillet, a restorer at the British Museum. Diana is quite taken with Alex’s find and immediately phones Bats Boswell, British Museum curator of rare books to ask him to examine the book.

After Bats eagerly inspects the book, he makes a mysterious phone call and tells Alex that the book is a forgery, albeit a high quality one. He declares that even though the book is not an original, the Plumtrees have an obligation to share it with the public and he will take charge of the book. Alex waffles, as Boswell’s manner seems decidedly different since the phone call, but agrees to think about it.

After consulting with Diana, Alex leaves the book in her care to make copies so that she may examine the text in detail. On his return home, Alex is accosted and someone tries to steal the bag he used to transport the book to the museum. Obviously, his “fake” book is of great interest to someone.

This is a very difficult review for me. Having read and enjoyed the three previous entries in this series, I am a big fan of Julie Kaewert. She has increased my knowledge of book collecting, binding, and printing, as well as the care and feeding of antiquarian books. For this, I am greatly in her debt. Untitled starts in much the same way as her previous books, with a plethora of facts about antiquarian books. She carefully defines uncommon terms and points out differences in binding techniques while indicating their significance.

However, we are only treated to about fifty pages of this lore when she launches into a plot involving many bizarre action scenes. The mild-mannered Alex, who appears to be more interested in exercise of the mind rather than body, in the space of a few chapters, gets dumped in the ocean off a boat and almost drowns, takes not one, but two helicopter rides in which his life is endangered, and agrees to ride in a point-to-point horse race when (to my knowledge) he has no equestrian skills at all.

Supposedly, these events in which Alex is participating are mirroring events in a book published by a prestigious book society that invites Alex to join. His trials are part of an initiation rite that seemed a bit contrived. I savored the parts about antiquarian books, but the rest of the book had my shaking my head in disappointment.

I can only plead with Ms. Kaewert and her editor (who may decide what the public will buy) that I, for one, would love to have less insane action scenes and have the plot more closely tied to Alex’s real area of expertise -- the book world.

--Andy Plonka