The Hand in the Dark

In the autumn of 1918, a party of London friends settles into an ancient Sussex moat-house built on the site of a Saxon castle and stained by eight centuries of murder, betrayal, and a family curse said to end in horror. The home belongs to the Herediths: a tired baronet, his formidable spinster sister Alethea, and a young war-invalid son who has brought home a pretty, restless bride from Whitehall.

One guest is leaving for the front; one is a jewel hunter from the far corners of the earth, come to examine the famous Heredith pearl necklace; one is a newspaper man with enemies in powerful quarters. A woman lies ill upstairs, refusing to be disturbed, while downstairs the household dines on wartime austerity and old wine.

When the necklace vanishes from its jewel-case, the house party disperses into a night of country roads, moonlight, and long-held secrets, the moat-house begins to give up its ghosts. What was taken, and what was taken with it, will pull the family's buried history into the open.