THE YELLOW MANUSCRIPT by Jenny Maloney

Sylvie Andrews found the dead man’s hidden manuscript in the false bottom of a drawer in his roll-top desk.

It was the stuff of daydreams for a graduate English major to be allowed into legendary novelist George Pickerman’s study in the first place. To find three hundred single-spaced typed pages which had never been seen before was like something out of an Indiana Jones movie; it was all Sylvie could do not to shout in triumph or pee her pants. A false drawer bottom? Really? Who did that?

Pickerman, who had been compared alternatively to H.P. Lovecraft, Edgar Allan Poe, and Stephen King, had grown reclusive in later life — which drew even more comparisons, this time to J.D. Salinger. After his sudden death, his wife had made a call to the top graduate programs in the country for three or four Pickerman scholars…