After twenty years, the road has finally brought Caleb Cade home.

 

Running from both a broken heart and the hangman’s noose he followed it across Europe; searching for happiness in a pretty girl’s smile, the turn of a card and the depths of a brandy glass. Instead, he became a womaniser, and then a thief living behind a charmer’s smile until, finally, the road ensnared him in insanity and murder.

 

It is 1708, the Age of The Enlightenment, and Caleb has returned to London a broken man; incapable of love and terrified of the grave, his only friend the half-imagined ghost of his dead brother. The road has now brought him home for there is nowhere left to run, and his only hope of redemption is to find the man he might have been.

 

Haunted by his own ghosts and demons, he relives the tragic events of his childhood and the fear that the King of the Winter is forever peering through his window, all cold of heart and sly of eye, waiting to take him down to damnation.

 

But while one journey ends another begins. Louis Defane, a strange little man around which strange things seem to happen, befriends Caleb. He is a man with an insatiable appetite for all the pleasures of life, a man who can seemingly bend people’s will to his own, a man with sparkling blue January eyes and snow white hair.

 

A man who might not be a man at all…

 

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