Damien March is a disconsolate journalist working the nightshift at the BBC in London. He hasn't thought of his eccentric uncle for almost twenty years when he receives a terse message by telegram: 'Patrick dead. Father.' He is even more shocked to learn that he has inherited his uncle's ramshackle house on an isolated island off the coast of Cape Cod.
Without a job or relationship compelling enough to keep him in his humdrum life, Damien decides to take off to the Cape. But his new future means moving circuitously into his family's past; rummaging through his uncle's possessions, he finds letters and writings that provide scattered clues to Patrick's solitary life. And when he discovers a fragment of an unpublished mystery novel, 'The Confessions of Mycroft Holmes', the parallels with his uncle's life quickly grow more disconcerting and Damien realises the tale of murder and deception is taking on a sinister new meaning . . .
