Scotland Yard Superintendent Perry Trethowan is enjoying a vacation evening at a cosy Yorkshire pub when an old woman shows him an original, unpublished Bronte manuscript. Trethowan agrees to engage in a little literary detective work, but he doesn’t realise that for a criminal the manuscript is motive for theft, torture - and murder.
Jonathan Hughes, an anthropologist specialising in social stereotyping, is determined to re-examine this case. There were alarming disparities in the evidence and Hughes has little doubt that there has been a terrible miscarriage of justice. But there is also something else pushing this half-Iranian, half-Libyan outsider to reach for the truth . . . This is more than a mere expose of corruption, it is a dark tale of solitude...