Jennie Erdal's first book, Ghosting, published in 2004, was an account of the time she served as amanuensis and ghostwriter to the publish­-er Naim Attallah. The narrator of The Missing Shade of Blue, her debut novel (her debut in her own name, at least - she wrote two under Attallah's), is also a ghost of sorts. Edgar Logan, a 40-ish Frenchman with an English father, is a translator, a vocation he compares to "liv[ing] vicariously" as a kind of "shadow".