This story is set in north Pembrokeshire and the industrial districts of South Wales in the Victorian era. Marching through the pages of the book there are some truly Dickensian characters, including Sergeant Dafydd Gruffydd and the Emperor of China. As the fast-moving and extraordinary story unfolds, the twin themes of identity and personality come to the fore. A strange memoir called “The Ghost of Inglestone” is found among the rejected Gothic novels and other papers of the long-defunct London publishers Pickersniff and Jebson. It is written by a woman called Susanna Ravenhill, an author unknown from the records of Victorian literature. The name is clearly a non-de-plume, but who was she, and what was she doing in London in 1857? Is the story autobiographical, or is it a work of wild fantasy? Susanna is fleeing from a dark secret which is known to only a small group of fellow conspirators. But she is pursued without mercy by a group of mysterious armed men whose motives are unclear. She fears, with good reason, that they have murder or blackmail in mind. She keeps one step ahead of them through her own cunning and through the intervention of various guardian angels who see it as their job to protect her. But then, in Paris, her implacable enemy catches up with her, and from that point on she has to cope with a threat far bigger than anything she has ever faced before. She deals with that, but she has to learn -- the hard way -- that she should never have tried to leave her past entirely behind her.
