The Final Reflection

John M. Ford’s “People of the Night” is an extraordinary novel about the game of intelligence agencies and human betrayal, weaving the past and the present into an atmosphere of suspense.

Nicholas Hansard is a talented historian from a small college in New England. His public career is only the surface; his secret work is for the White Group—an “investigative and advisory agency” with shadowy ties in government. In cooperation with them, Hansard exposes the secrets of old and new documents—and reveals himself as a brilliant decipherer.

But a profitable job has many pitfalls. As a result, it turns out: one of Hansard’s friends and colleagues, Dr. Allan Berenson, is a Russian spy. And then Berenson dies under mysterious circumstances. Shocked, Hansard escapes into the world of literature and plunges into studying an ancient manuscript that may be the work of none other than Christopher Marlowe himself. The scholar is certain: nowhere is it possible to hide from the dark secrets and murders of modern times more reliably than in a lost play from 400 years ago…

He has never been more mistaken.