The Thousand

Kevin Guilfoile’s riveting follow-up to Cast of Shadows (“Spellbinding” —Chicago Tribune; “A masterpiece of intelligent plotting” —Salon) centers on an extraordinary young woman’s race to find her father’s killer and to free herself from the crossfire of a centuries-old, clandestine civil war in which she has unknowingly become ensnared.

In 500 B.C. a mysterious ship appeared off the coast of what is now Italy. A man disembarked to address the frightened crowd along the shore. He called himself Pythagoras and when he was done speaking a thousand men and women abandoned their lives to follow him; his disciples would influence western philosophy, science, and mathematics for all time.

Chicago, the present. Solomon Gold has tapped into valuable and dangerous secrets while composing his magnum opus: the Gold Completion of Mozart’s infamous unfinished requiem. After he is murdered, his brilliant daughter—a girl whose uncanny mental gifts have left her both powerful and troubled—finds herself racing to understand his composition, his murder, and, as violence erupts all around her, a fractured, ancient cult descended from the original disciples of Pythagoras.

The Thousand is ringing confirmation of Guilfoile’s enormous talent.