It’s been 400 years since Dutch sea captain Cornelius Vanderdecker and his crew drank an immortality elixir that they mistook for beer. Now the compounded interest on a life insurance policy he took out in the 1500s makes him worth more money than exists in all the world…and he may be close to the end of his boring immortality.
In Burke himself is in danger of becoming a victim. Two rogue cops are stalking him. The coolly seductive Belinda Roberts wants him to free a man charged with a grisly string of rape-murders. The brutal and half-crazy Detective Jorge Morales may be trying to frame Burke for the same crimes. What ensues is a novel of high-wire suspense and nightmarish authenticity informed by an insider's knowledge of the city where everything—from flesh to other people's cellular phone numbers—is up for sale.
It is 1807 and portrait painter Charles Corday, charged with the murder of a Countess he was in the process of painting, has only seven days to live. Political pressures make it expedient for the Home Office to confirm his guilt. The man appointed to investigate is Rider Sandman, whose qualifications for the job are non-existent and who is currently down on his luck. The offer of even a temporary post, promising a generous fee for not much effort, seems ideal. But Sandman's investigations reveal much that does not fit the verdict, and many people determined to halt his activities. Sandman has a soldier's skills and he has remarkable, if unconventional, allies. But ranged against them is a cabal of some of the wealthiest and most ruthless men of Regency England. Sandman has a mere seven days to snatch an innocent man from the hungriest gallows of Europe. The hangman is waiting. It is a race against the noose.
Long buried and hidden from prying eyes are the twilight tales of the living and the dead - and those that are neither. The stink of a Paris morgue, the curve of a devil’s footprint, forbidden pages torn from an infernal tome, madness in a dead woman’s stare, a lost voice from beneath the waves and the cold indifference of an insect’s feeding all hold cryptic clues. From the comfort of the Seine to the chill blast of arctic winds, from candlelit monasteries to the callous and uncaring streets of Las Vegas are found arcane stories of men, monsters and their evil. Twelve new tales of the bizarre, the uncanny and the arcane.
