On a sultry summer night in 1994, Nathaniel and Katherine Gye are guests at a Civil War fancy-dress party. The theme of the occasion is apt because Tripletree, the Jacobean manor house in the heart of the Cotswolds where the event is being held, is steeped in history and enjoys a colorful past. But at the end of a glittering evening tragedy strikes, and the body of a woman is dragged from the lake. This is merely the first of a catalog of misadventure that befalls the introverted rural community, dominated by a legacy of witchcraft and feuds. As he tries to unravel the truth, Nathaniel Gye, a parapsychic investigator, finds himself drawn back to the 17th century and the time when the hill above Tripletree manor was the place where the gallows once stood.

When paranormal investigator and Cambridge lecturer Dr. Nathaniel Gye is commissioned by a dead man to find his killer, he dismisses the incident as a clumsy fraud by a fake medium. But when Nathaniel's own wife disappears—an eventuality foretold by the same "unquiet spirit"—he is forced to look for connections between her predicament and the violent death of a man she never knew. Nathaniel's search leads him through a labyrinthine investigation, involving a stolen Renaissance painting and the love life of Robert and Elizabeth Browning. Drawn deep into a web of crime and deception, Nathaniel Gye has to face some difficult questions. In this dark and fast-paced mystery, long-time or first-time fans of acclaimed writer Derek Wilson will enjoy pitting their wits against the unscrupulous manipulation of the living and the dead.

A haunting on F staircase in St. Thomas' College, Cambridge bitterly divides the college, and the Cambridge branch of the Psychic Investigation Unit (PIU) is invited to carry out an experiment. The main opponent of the plan, Professor Hawkridge, insists on being present when for the nocturnal investigation by the 'ghostbusters', only to drop dead of a heart attack. Now the college is really in trouble. The press has a field day, Hawkridge's widow threatens to sue, and St. Thomas' is swamped with tourists who want to sleep in the 'haunted' room.' Sir Joseph Zuylestein, the College Master, asks Dr. Nathaniel Gye, a parapsychologist, if he can make some discreet enquiries with a view to closing the whole sorry business—the affair could not have come at a worse time, as St. Thomas' is about to accept a major donation from a publicity-shy billionaire. But Zuylestein has another reason for wanting everything hushed up—he has received anonymous letters indicating that the undergraduate Tom Sutton, whose unquiet spirit supposedly haunts F staircase, did not commit suicide ten years earlier, but was murdered.