Called Back

Fog-throttled London becomes a moral labyrinth when Anthony March—lithe, luminous, heir to a fortune that glints like frost on iron—discovers that the uncle who once bounced him on a velvet knee, Dr. Manuel Ceneri, has siphoned every sovereign through ledger-legerdemain. Ceneri, a carnivorous voluptuary with a surgeon’s hands and a mortician’s heart, enlists Macari, a velvet-gloved viper from the Limehouse underbelly, to cauterise the threat of exposure with strychnine and silk. On the night the Thames smells of rusted pennies, they lure Anthony to a parlour where gaslight drips like congealed yolk; the dagger’s descent is interrupted by Gilbert Vaughan, a blind composer whose cane taps a Morse of doom. Pauline, Anthony’s sister, witnesses the shattering of her world through a French-window lattice, faints into amnesiac white-out, and awakens in a city that has forgotten her name. Believing the crime evaporated into the chimney-soot, Ceneri and Macari swagger through clubland—until the past returns wearing Vaughan’s sightless eyes and Pauline’s vengeance stitched into her trembling palms.