Edgar Award Finalist A struggling silhouette artist in Victorian Bath seeks out a renowned child spirit medium in order to speak to the dead - and to try and identify their killers - in this beguiling new tale from the queen of Gothic fiction, Laura Purcell As the age of the photograph dawns in Victorian Bath, silhouette artist Agnes is struggling to keep her business afloat. Still recovering from a serious illness herself, making enough money to support her elderly mother and her orphaned nephew Cedric has never been easy, but then one of her clients is murdered shortly after sitting for Agnes, and then another, and another... Why is the killer seemingly targeting her business? Desperately seeking an answer, Agnes approaches Pearl, a child spirit medium lodging in Bath with her older half-sister and her ailing father, hoping that if Pearl can make contact with those who died, they might reveal who killed them. But Agnes and Pearl quickly discover that instead they may have opened the door to something that they can never put back.

Of Purcell the man very little is known, and his personality has to be reconstructed through the age in which he lived, the circumstances of his professional life, the men and women who knew him, and above all through his music. Robert King weaves a masterly narrative, bringing together politics (always in the forefront of Purcell's fortunes), religion, society and the theater, relating all this to the state of music at the time - instruments, techniques, foreign influences, and formal innovations.