Nicholas Dyer, assistant to Sir Christopher Wren plans to conceal a dark secret at the heart of each church - to create a forbidding architecture that will survive for eternity. Two hundred and fifty years later, London detective Nicholas Hawksmoor is investigating a series of gruesome murders on the sites of certain eighteenth-century churches.
But when he invents an imaginary sister to win the attention of a rich but unreliable 'friend', and then falls in love for real, undergraduate life becomes its own strange world . 'Absolutely contemporary - perhaps even prophetic.' Joyce Carol Oates 'Remarkable .