A VOICE FROM THE CONGO

It had been a particularly unpleasant murder - a family slaughtered and their house burned to cover the crime... But that wasn't Rider's business. He was in Westhaven to convalesce. A little sea air and rest.Finding the origin of the curious dedication in an antiquarian book seems like an innocent way of passing the time. As is getting closer to the girl who runs the bookshop. But what begins as a literary riddle - the inspiration for the character Kurtz in Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness - soon reveals the darker side of its grisly source. A nineteenth-century African expedition had ended in disaster, scandalizing Victorian England with rumours of murder and cannibalism. But everything concerning Rider's innocent pursuit, he discovers, leads back to that house on the cliff; its former owner - a bitter old recluse with his own way of taking revenge on a society that ignored him - and the subsequent owners, the family found dead alongside their murderer in the burned-out ruins. At least that's what the police decided had happened. And someone is determined that that is how it will remain. Even if Rider has to die to keep it that way.