It's been 14 years since Thursday pegged out at the 1988 SuperHoop, and Friday is now a difficult 16-year-old. However, Thursday's got bigger problems. Sherlock Holmes is killed, and his series is stopped in its tracks. And before this can be corrected, Miss Marple dies suddenly in a car accident, bringing her series to a close as well. When Thursday receives a death threat clearly intended for her written self, she realizes what's going on: there is a serial killer on the loose in the Bookworld.

The Gingerbreadman, psychopath, sadist, genius, and killer, is on the loose. But it isn't Jack Spratt's case. He and Mary Mary have been demoted to Missing Persons following Jack's poor judgment involving the poisoning of Mr. Bun the baker. Missing Persons looks like a boring assignment until a chance encounter leads them into the hunt for missing journalist Henrietta "Goldy" Hatchett, star reporter for The Daily Mole.

It's Easter in Reading, a bad time for eggs, and no one can remember the last sunny day. Ovoid D-class nursery celebrity Humpty Stuyvesant Van Dumpty III, minor baronet, ex-convict, and former millionaire philanthropist, is found shattered to death beneath a wall in a shabby area of town. All the evidence points to his ex-wife, who has conveniently shot herself.

After spending her time chasing a stray Minotaur into pulp Westerns, filling in for Joan of Arc, and raising her infant son, Friday, Thursday needs a break in the real world. But her return to Swindon is far from relaxing. Rogue fictioneer Yorrick Kaine and the evil multinational Goliath Corporation are trying to rule the world, and a deadly assassin called the Windowmaker is tracking Thursday's every move.

Thursday Next, the forthright and unstoppable detective of Jasper Fforde's first two novels, The Eyre Affair and Lost in a Good Book, rides again in The Well of Lost Plots. Get ready for time travel, adventure, mystery, romance, and crime in a literary caper that pokes fun at fiction itself.

Inventive and uniquely original novelist Jasper Fforde sends his literary sleuth on another wildly imaginative journey through time and literature. Thursday Next faces a sinister global multinational corporation represented by Mr. Schitt-Hawse, beats the magistrate from Kafka's The Trial at his own game, and trains for her next assignment by apprenticing herself to Miss Havisham. Thursday then accepts the ultimate challenge: capture Acheron Hades, the murderer of characters from the classics.