The Sin Eater

When Benedict Doyle finds himself the owner of his great-grandfather's north London house, he is dismayed. For it was in that house, as a frightened eight-year-old, that the strange glimpses into his great-grandfather's life began: eerie shutter-flash images that have gradually revealed sinister darkness in his family's past. Through that darkness runs the grisly thread of an old legend about a chess set - 32 carved figures believed to possess a dark power, but shut away in the forgotten library of a tumbledown Irish castle for many decades. When Michael Flint, meeting Benedict in Oxford, starts to research his story, chilling facts begin to emerge - facts that suggest the old legend contains a disturbing reality. And when Nell West, no stranger to the eeriness of old properties, begins to compile an inventory of Holly Lodge's contents for her antique business, it seems that the chess set's malevolence might be reaching out to the present . . .