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The Stormhaven Etiquette Society is a secretive affair, moral guardians of the town and not afraid to name and shame those who transgress. Though the five members are hardly friends. Model Services is Stormhaven’s only brothel, a discrete but busy presence in Church Street. The boss thinks of it as a moral crusade. The damp and desolate Bybuckle Asylum is a ghost from the past, an empty shell of a building on the sea front that used to house over seven hundred mental patients, until closed in the 1970s in the rush for ‘care in the community’.
What brings these three together is a cold-blooded murder – more an execution – that both shocks and confounds. For lying dead in the empty asylum, tied to an old metal bed frame, is a pillar of the local community. Or is she?
As Stormhaven’s veneer of respectability starts cracking, DI Tamsin Shah once again brings Abbot Peter in on a case that will ask more of him than mere detection. For while Stormhaven must now face a difficult aspect of its own past – the treatment of the insane by the sea – the abbot must do the same, as he finds himself stirred by feelings he thought he’d left behind. The past throws both a long shadow and a deep one, and to find the murderer, Peter will need to step into its very particular darkness, with only the lunatic ghosts for friends.
