Book I of The Gosie Chronicles Synopsis
Gosie and the Hidden Symbol
Gosie (pronounced Go-See) is a gerbil investigator who works out of the Bluestocking, a women-only pub run by gerbils. She operates alone, on her own terms, and her curiosity is piqued by a painting.
A piece in a half forgotten side room at Ardnamurchan turns out to be connected to an earlier work Gosie already suspected existed, one that could change the accepted timeline for a body of art if authenticated. But she isn’t the only one who has found it. Someone else has been there first, competent enough to test the surface but not competent enough to finish. That changes the shape of the investigation. It isn’t just attribution anymore. It’s a race.
The trail takes her to Android’s lab, where the painting is placed under proper scrutiny and turns out to be too coherent to be entirely what it claims. It takes her to a French philosopher named @MarieDeGournay, whose front room is the place where the facts stop shifting under her feet, and who gives her a single lead rather than a lecture: these things moved through women, copied and passed on, not hidden but circulated. That lead sends Gosie to Oxford and a small, semi-private manuscript collection.
From there the case widens. Ireland, canals, towpath intelligence, a set of shipping routes that don’t add up on paper. Along the way she picks up allies who are patrons of the Bluestocking and who each bring their own skills: @Hedgehogforshort, @AngleofRepose, @Magpiecomplex, @Boiledbeetle and others. The routes lead to Plymouth, where Gosie is arrested by the police and The Bluestocking hires Octavia Briefcase, a barrister ocelot with a fierce reputation to represent her.
When it turns out that Gosie has actually been kidnapped by smugglers pretending to be police, the Bluestocking sends out a successful rescue mission led by the intrepid pirate, Swashbuckled on her galleon,The Dreadnork, which leads to a three week transatlantic voyage chasing a smugglers’ yacht, ending in Portland, Maine. There they find a hidden cargo and a paper trail to a facility run by Talmere, the largest conglomerate in the world.
Inside, Gosie finds crates marked only as Component. Stone fragments. Documents. Seeds. Paintings. All logged against a project called Aurelia, with a completion percentage climbing close toward one hundred and a status marked Green. Nobody helping her knows what Aurelia is. What they do know is that whoever is building it has resources, patience, and a plan that has been running for a long time. The crew thwarts the completion of the Aurelia project by having all the components seized by Canadian Customs.
The case ends with an unscheduled boarding of a smugglers’ yacht, a homecoming, and one small fragment of paper still in Gosie’s pocket: a donation record from Talmere for a chapter house window fund, paid on behalf of someone called the Margrave. The crew returns to the Bluestocking where the gerbils are rewarded with exotic sunflower seeds for their help, and Gosie tells no one else about the fragment..