Bound by Gold Chains

Leaving St. Milborn-Under-the Hill and the murders that had been committed there, David Hutchings and Clare Edwards want to believe the chief part of the guilt and the loneliness and, too, the punishment for their past sins are now behind them, that the budding dawn of a new day is waiting there in London for the two of them as they return to England's greatest city. All they have to do is to turn their faces toward its glow to feel its invigorating warmth and the promise of a new life together.

Little are they aware that death continues to stalk them, ponderously and relentlessly. Just as they discover they are not truly free of their pasts, they soon find themselves once again entangled in a series of murders that have as their source events from an age now thought irrelevant and best left discarded on the rubbish heap of history. They realize, as they did in St. Milborns, that the past never cedes its right to exist. It stretches out its dead hands to continually warp and distort the present and the future.

David and Clare thought they had found a path toward redemption and forgiveness through each other. That they might finally be healed. They soon find that hope to be as ethereal as the reasons for these murders. For every new uncovered fact and connection to the deceased brings no greater clarity, only added confusion and less substance to the possible theories for their gruesome passings. Yet even as David's and Clare's nascent relationship founders and then breaks as a further outcome of the deaths surrounding them, the impetus for the solution is found in their renewed pain and desolation, in the lies and the loss of trust in each other, and in the danger that lurks steadily closer.