A disgraced artist returns to the village of his youth, hoping to disappear into its shadows. Basil Beaumont, handsome and morally hollow, has fled London creditors to Garsworth, where his presence reawakens old wounds. The doctor whose life Beaumont nearly destroyed watches his every move. The women who once loved him now have reasons to fear him. And somewhere in this claustrophobic world of gaslit parlors and whispered gossip, Beaumont guards a secret dangerous enough to destroy everything around him. Fergus Hume, the master who gave us "The Mystery of a Hansom Cab," weaves a darker, more psychologically dense tale here: one where the real mystery isn't what happened, but what a man will do to protect himself from his own past. The tension builds like a storm gathering over the English countryside, quiet and inevitable. For readers who relish Victorian novels where every handshake conceals a motive and every smile hides a blade, this is a portrait of a man trapped by his own history, unable to escape what he was.
