Midsummer's Eve, 1648, England is in the grip of civil war between renegade King and rebellious Parliament. The struggle reaches to every corner of the kingdom, even the remote Tidelands - the marshy landscape of the south coast. Alinor a descendant of wise women, crushed by poverty and superstition, waits in the graveyard under the full moon for a ghost who will declare her free from her abusive husband. Instead, she meets James, a young man on the...

Special Agent A.X.L. Pendergast, with his ward Constance Greene, has arrived in Exmouth, Massachusetts, to investigate the theft of a priceless wine collection. But inside the cellar, behind the empty bottle racks, they find something considerably more macabre: the remains of a sealed chamber complete with rusted leg irons, fragments of bone and claw marks on the inside-face of its bricks. Then a historian is found murdered in the desolate salt marshes...