Osgood dispatches his young clerk to Boston's waterfront to retrieve the latest installment of the "Drood" manuscript, shipped over from London. The clerk is pursued by book pirates - called "bookaneers" - and by a mysterious stranger. He is mortally wounded and found with needle tracks on his arm. The pages are missing.
To save his firm from financial ruin, Osgood, accompanied by Rebecca Sand, a bookkeeper at the publishing house and sister of the murdered clerk, embarks on a quest to determine if Dickens finished his manuscript, or at least knew how he would end it.
Osgood's quest takes him to London, to Dickens's English publisher, Christie's auction rooms, an opium den, and to Dickens's country house, and then back to Boston.
But things are not as they appear, and it becomes clear that those involved in the opium trade - not just the publishing trade - have a vested interest in the outcome of "Drood."
Pearl's strength is his masterful research; substantive plot twists are provided by the color of ink that Dickens used in his pen, a stalker based on a woman who actually hounded Charles Dickens, and Dickens's fascination with the murder of Boston's George Parkman.
But the plot often overreaches, and the reader loses sight of it, particularly in the less successful subplot - the opium wars in Bengal, India, involving Dickens's son Francis, with which the book confusingly begins. And when the coincidences continue to pile up, the reader's credulity becomes deeply strained.
While the plot goes its peripatetic way, individual words and sentences also lose their focus. Clunkers appear: "gallantly chuckling," "replied eerily," "casual downcast glare" (how can a glare be casual?), and anachronisms: "mind-set" (first used in 1909 according to the Oxford English Dictionary), "hassled" (1945, OED) ; and "de-Bostonize" (a locution with a decidedly modern tinge) serve to draw us away from 1870.
