Criminal defence lawyer Bartholomew Crane is despatched to a small lakeside town in Northern Ontario with a brief to defend a schoolteacher accused of murdering two teenaged girls. He assumes it will be an open-and-shut case and that he'll be back carousing in Toronto before the month is out, for the girls' bodies have never been found and the Crown's evidence against the teacher is scant. But the deeper Barth digs into the teacher's - and the town's - past, the more disturbed and distressed he becomes. Peculiar visions haunt his imagination; telephones ring ceaselessly in the dead of night; the gargoyles above his hotel's entrance seem to be watching him; and sometimes, out of the furthest corner of his eye - if he looks hard enough - he can see two identically dressed girls following wherever he goes . . .

Is his mind playing tricks on him? Or has Barth been dragged into the town's spiralling collective hysteria?

'Extremely compelling' Sunday Telegraph

'Remarkable and compelling' The Times

'A remarkably fine debut novel' Time Out

'Hugely impressive and utterly compelling' Independent

'A truly scary ghost story' Maxim

'This is one scary book' Independent on Sunday