In misty nineteenth-century Edinburgh a headstrong orphan girl is swept off to a hunting lodge and sacrificed to a mysterious figure – the lamplgihter. Twenty years later four men – a religious academic, a colonel, a shady entrepreneur and a retired lighthouse keeper – are brutally murdered.
What monster is responsible? Is there a connection between the victims? And what of the anguished young woman who claims to have dreamed the murders in great detail, and repeatedly blames ‘the lamplighter’?
Leading the official investigation is Carus Groves, an ageing police inspector desperate to crack a sensational case. Leading the unofficial investigation are Thomas McKnight, Professor of Logic and Metaphysics, and his young assistant, the Irish cemetery attendant Joseph Canavan.
Using reason, intuition, philosophy, and luck, these men race to solve the murders and unveil the source of Evelyn’s torment, and in so doing penetrate the very gates of Hell.
