When a woman found dead near the Peerless Pool is identified as Hannah Rankin, an assistant at St Luke’s Hospital for Lunatics, Sir John Fielding assigns John Rawlings to the case. Rawlings’s enquiries inside the institution uncover traces of a hidden past and connect Hannah’s death with the unexplained disappearance of a child.
The investigation eventually draws him from London to Bath and to a house whose inhabitants appear determined to keep old secrets buried. Lake uses the contrast between Georgian leisure and the confinement of the asylum to widen the mystery beyond a single killing, forcing Rawlings to ask who had authority over vulnerable people and how easily a respectable household could hide wrongdoing from public view.
