(upbeat music) - My name is Peng Shepherd and this is "The Cartographers."

(upbeat music) The cartographers, they're a group of seven friends and they are responsible for discovering the map that the book is about, and they also discover the secret that's on it.

It ends up just kind of tearing the friends apart.

30 years later, Nell, who's the main character, she discovers that map and then has to kind of go on a like a little bit of a scavenger hunt to find each of these seven cartographers and find out what they know.

(upbeat music) - It's so fascinating.

How did you come to be interested in maps?

- When you're young and you just you live in your hometown, you're not old enough to start traveling yet by yourself 'cause you're just a kid, and so maps are the way that you start exploring the world, kind of.

And, you know, you get, you pick up an atlas and you look at this country that you've never been to and you read the names of the places and, you know, follow where the roads go, and it just felt kind of like magic.

Upbeat music There is this somewhat obscure cartography term, phantom settlement, and what it means essentially is an error that's on a map and cartographers of old used to put phantom settlements on their maps kind of as a way to protect their work.

If that error turns up on someone else's work, the only way it could be there is if they copied yours.

Upbeat music I couldn't stop thinking about, what, what more could happen with that, you know?

That error, that secret.

What if it became real?

There's this farm in the middle of Kansas and a couple years ago, people started showing up asking for weird things, like they were insisting that their lost dog was there or like their iPhone had been stolen and that's where it was, and even like bounty hunters were turning up saying that their fugitive was there.

And it turns out whenever GPS or the internet doesn't know the specific location of something, it defaults to the exact geographic center of the United States, and that farm happens to be the exact geographic center.

- [J.T.]

No kidding.

- Yeah.

(upbeat music) - Thank you so much.

- Thank you.

- This has been been so delightful.

I'm really excited for all the success for the book.

I hope it continues being awesome for you.

- Oh, well thank you.

Thank you.

It was an honor to be here.

- And thank you for watching "A Word on Words."

I'm J. T. Ellison.

Keep reading.

(upbeat music) - [Peng] When I start a book, I don't have any plans.

I have no outline, I have no notes, and I think because this one was a mystery, you kind of need a plan.