Young Broadbrim on a False Clew

Old Broadbrim has faced killers, criminals, and cunning masterminds—but he has never faced a lie this carefully constructed.

When a dandified Anglo-American heir stumbles into Broadbrim's office with a ghost story, the famous Quaker detective smells something far more dangerous than a man in a white sheet. The old Richardson mansion on Long Island—shuttered for twenty years, watched over by blind and deaf caretakers—has begun to breathe again. Strange lights flash in the dark. A cold, clammy hand presses against a sleeping man's face.

The lawyer assigned to the estate offers Broadbrim a tidy explanation. Too tidy. Broadbrim sits silent, watches the man's face betray every word his tongue speaks, and walks away certain of one thing: someone powerful is spinning a lie—and spinning it fast.

As Broadbrim and his sharp young partner Harry Wilson descend on the gray house, the Quaker detective senses the shadow of his greatest enemy behind every false clew. Ignatius Morello—cunning, ruthless, and never truly gone—may have chosen this crumbling Long Island mansion as the stage for their next collision.

Broadbrim presses deeper into the darkness of the gray house, reading silence and lamplight and crooked smiles the way other men read confessions.

But can he unravel the mystery before the real ghost of this case—a living, breathing villain—strikes first?