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Sea air and rest, his doctor had prescribed and Henry Rider was in Westhaven to convalesce.
Tracing the origin of the curious dedication in an antiquarian book seemed like an innocent way of passing the time.
As was getting closer to the girl who ran the bookshop where he found it.
But what begins as a literary riddle - the inspiration for the character Kurtz in Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness - soon reveals the darker side of its grisly source: a nineteenth-century African expedition that ended in disaster, scandalizing Victorian England with rumours of murder and cannibalism.
And Westhaven too, Rider finds, has its own dark past. A particularly unpleasant murder - a family slaughtered and their house burned to cover the crime.
That isn't Rider's business but he soon finds everything concerning his innocent pursuit leads inescapably back to the charred ruins of the house on the cliff. To its former owner - a bitter old recluse with his own way of taking revenge on a society that ignored him - and the subsequent owners, the family found dead alongside their murderer in the charred ruins.
At least that's what the police decided had happened.
And someone is determined that is how it will remain.
Even if Rider has to die to keep it that way.
Genre: Mystery
Tracing the origin of the curious dedication in an antiquarian book seemed like an innocent way of passing the time.
As was getting closer to the girl who ran the bookshop where he found it.
But what begins as a literary riddle - the inspiration for the character Kurtz in Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness - soon reveals the darker side of its grisly source: a nineteenth-century African expedition that ended in disaster, scandalizing Victorian England with rumours of murder and cannibalism.
And Westhaven too, Rider finds, has its own dark past. A particularly unpleasant murder - a family slaughtered and their house burned to cover the crime.
That isn't Rider's business but he soon finds everything concerning his innocent pursuit leads inescapably back to the charred ruins of the house on the cliff. To its former owner - a bitter old recluse with his own way of taking revenge on a society that ignored him - and the subsequent owners, the family found dead alongside their murderer in the charred ruins.
At least that's what the police decided had happened.
And someone is determined that is how it will remain.
Even if Rider has to die to keep it that way.
Genre: Mystery
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