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Rory McLaughlin, while researching his family history in Australia, and Penny Longford, while producing a thesis on Jane Austen in the UK, discover verses that raise the possibility that the two to three hundred missing lines from Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s poem Kubla Khan were not forgotten by the poet – as he believed while immersed in an opium-induced fog – but were stolen and then misplaced. If this proves to be true and the lines are recovered, the value of a few scraps of paper would be catapulted into the same arena as the world’s most treasured works of art. During further research at libraries and on the internet, both Penny and Rory become aware that each is following a similar line of enquiry. Suspicions of the other’s motives are raised when some of those who have been assisting them become the victims of violent assaults and intimidation. Their most interesting antagonist is Dr Claudia Petersham, a forensic handwriting expert. She brings together a group of people who believe the missing lines will probably never be recovered but decide to exploit the initial discoveries by recruiting a leading British poet to fabricate a bogus copy of the complete poem. The story takes the reader from Sydney and the Hunter Valley, through libraries in London and Nottingham, towns and villages in Cornwall and Somerset and finally back to the Hunter Valley. There, shortly after Claudia Petersham seemingly destroys the poem by incinerating it in a moment of spite (shoots the albatross during a brief parody of The Rime of The Ancient Mariner), it is recovered in its entirety. The historical details that are unearthed by the protagonists will perhaps prompt some readers to check and confirm their authenticity on the web, thereby strengthening the story’s plausibility.
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