A Trail of Burnt Paper

When Phillip Bishop learns of his ex-lover's death he is ill prepared for the direction his life will take; the discovery of fragments of an unfinished novel sends him spiralling into a labyrinthine web of conspiracies, oblique references and esoteric clues; leading to what? The trail links unexpected sources from an unfinished erotic novel by Victorian illustrator Aubrey Beardsley to apocryphal books of the Old Testament via the strange experiments of an Elizabethan scholar mage. Phillip knows he's in the middle of something, but what has it got to do with Vikings, ceremonial magicians and Victorian decadents? And what has it got to do with Nazis and the horror fiction of H.P. Lovecraft? How much is his paranoia, how much is dangerously real and how much is a dead lover's final practical joke?