Viola Hatherley was a writer of ghost stories in the 1890s whose work lies forgotten until her great-grandson as a young boy in Mawson Australia learns how to open the secret drawer in his mother's room. There he finds a manuscript and from the moment his mother catches him in the act Gerard Freeman's life is irrevocably changed. What is the invisible ever-present threat from which his mother strives so obsessively to protect him? And why should stories written a century ago entwine themselves ever more closely around events in his own life? Gerard's quest to unveil the mystery that shrouds his family and his life will lead him from Mawson to London to a long-abandoned house and the terror of a ghost story come alive.
