The Curran family were tainted by scandal from the beginning - Judge Lance Curran, ambitious and driven, weighed down by gambling debt; the ascetic Desmond, lost in religious zealotry - and there were rumours of savage disagreements between Patricia and her mother. But most of the doubt concerned Patricia herself. Was she a spirited and confident proto-feminist, or an upper-class demi-mondaine, demanding and promiscuous? In a storm of publicity, rumour and counter-rumour, Scotland Yard dispatches Chief Inspector John Capstick, who uncovers a complex web of deceit. Determined to secure a conviction, Capstick's focus falls on a peripheral figure, a young army conscript, Iain Hay Gordon, who finds himself fighting for his life in the shadows of the gallows. Based on one of the greatest miscarriages of justice in post-war history, Eoin McNamee's new novel is at once a gripping thriller and a danse macabre through a shadowy world of corruption and sexual intrigue.