When John Williamson dies, his fortune goes to his favorite son, George. His younger son Igor, a London solicitor with a sharp mind and wounded pride, inherits what nobody else wants: Ravenwood Manor, a crumbling stone house on the Welsh coast, abandoned for decades. One Williamson was murdered there in 1789. Another died under unexplained circumstances in 1819.
Igor means to start over. He ignores the cold whistle at the door that tells him to turn back. He ignores the portraits whose eyes follow him down the corridor. And then the nights begin.
A dead colonel standing silently behind the gardener’s chair at dinner. A woman in white weeping in the hall. Ravens on the lake every morning. And a tall figure in a top hat, who lifts his hat in greeting and waits.
But Ravenwood is not only a house of ghosts. There is a masquerade ball, a woman named Clementine who may be the answer to everything, a nephew who fills the house with laughter, a neighbor with a poet’s heart. For a while, Igor is almost happy.
Then one terrible night he does something that cannot be undone. And the house does not forget.
Writing his memoir in what he believes are his last days, Igor leaves the reader to decide what was real. Was Ravenwood haunted? Cursed? Or is the madman who wrote these pages the only monster in the house?
Some inheritances carry more than money. Some carry a curse.