In the years before the Great War, M.R. James told ghost stories by candlelight to a handful of friends and scholars. Now, twenty-five years later, those men are dying, killed off one by one...

Nicola Upson was born in Suffolk and read English at Downing College, Cambridge. She has worked in theatre and as a freelance journalist, and is the author of two non-fiction works and the recipient of an Escalator Award from the Arts Council England.Her debut novel, An Expert in Murder, was the first in a series of crime novels whose main character is Josephine Tey - one of the leading authors of Britain's Golden Age of crime writing. It was praised by PD James as marking 'the arrival of a new and assured talent'. Nicola lives with her partner in Cambridge and Cornwall, which was the setting for her second novel, Angel With Two Faces. The third book in the series, Two for Sorrow, was followed by Fear in the Sunlight, The Death of Lucy Kyte and, most recently, London Rain.