In the novella The Librarian, the antiquarian Jack Tregarden looks back to his first disturbing investigation. The young Jack is a brilliant scholar from a working-class background who forms an unlikely friendship at Oxford with the charismatic and mysterious aristocrat Simon de Betancourt. Many years later Tregarden is invited by de Betancourt to his family home, Ashcombe Abbey, ostensibly to revise the catalogue in the house’s remarkable library. But as the days unfold Tregarden is confronted with a fiendish centuries’ old puzzle which he must solve to unlock the great mystery of Ashcombe. As a result, he is confronted by unimaginable and terrifying forces which challenge his most fundamental beliefs.

This book also includes three ghostly short stories:

• In ’24th June’ the anniversary of his wife’s death turns into a day Matthew Hargreaves will never forget.
• The idea of all-pervasive Nature is given its ultimate expression in ‘How the Trees Grew’.
• An infamous crime returns to haunt the latest member of an ancient family in ‘Golgotha Heights’.