The Award-winning novelist’s Booker Prize nominated first novel has soared into the bestseller charts yet again – thirty-four years after it was first published and became an instant bestseller!

A wonderful read…the satisfying climax weaves together the strands of past and present.…A poised telling of a complex tale. — Publishers Weekly

One of the best novels I’ve read in a long time…I loved every one of its 500 pages. — Washington Post

A hornet’s nest of jealousy, blackmail and violence. Engrossing. — Daily Mail

A complex trail of blackmail and murder. Recommended. — Daily Express

At a luxurious villa on the sun-soaked island of Madeira, unemployed historian Martin Radford is given a second chance. Martin is shown the leather-bound journal of another ruined man, former British cabinet minister Edwin Strafford.

Martin is offered a job—to return to England and investigate the rise and fall of Strafford, an ambitious young politician whose downfall, in 1910, is as mysterious as the strange deaths that still haunt his family.

Martin is intrigued. Strafford resigned at the height of his career, disappearing from the public eye. The woman he loved, for whom he was willing to sacrifice everything, suddenly and coldly rejected him. All the reasons for his fall from grace are shrouded in darkness.

Martin’s investigations trigger a violent series of events, throwing him straight into the path of those who believed they had escaped punishment for crimes long past but never paid for . . .

And Martin himself may find that he must risk his life to discover the truth.