'Playfully elegant and effortlessly seductive' Telegraph

A stunning new crime novel from this award-winning writer

The Island of Thanet, 1808. One man is pushed into a kiln of molten metal beneath the looming shadow of the Shot Tower, and another is dug up from the sandy bay beyond. Who they were, and why they died so strangely, is no ordinary mystery, and Missing Persons Finder Whilbert Stroop has a hard time finding answers.

On arrival in this marshy, coastal corner of Kent, on the very edge of England, Stroop tries to piece together the puzzle of these deaths, and the significance of the objects each man died trying to protect. It is a conspiracy that began ten years before on the battlefields of Europe, and one that will claim more lives before it is done.

"'Just as bloody as THE DA VINCI CODE... however, much better written'" - SCOTSMAN

"'Clio Gray is a master of atmosphere and sensuousness. She combines historical realism with the bizarre, whimsy with the macabre. Reading her is like being at a sumptuous feast in a palace, just before it is stormed'" - Alan Bissett