Tim Curwen is any bookseller's ideal customer - polite, enthusiastic, loyal, and rich. But three days after Dido Hoare sells him Charles Dickens's The Haunted Man, her elegant young customer jumps to his death. Not only that: his cheque has bounced.Being as stubborn as the next antiquarian book dealer, Dido sets out to retrieve either the book or her money. Simple? Yet the book is missing from Curwen's flat. So are all the other valuable books she has ever sold him, as well as his personal belongings, right down to the food in the kitchen - not forgetting his mysterious sister, if she really exists.With the reluctant help of her father, Professor Barnabas Hoare, a drunken policeman and a thoroughly unreliable journalist, Dido follows a trail from the empty mansion flat to an abandoned house in London's East End, from threat to cover-up, from betrayal to more deaths. Her determination leads her step by step to an unexpected and perilous truth. Read Less