Description April, 1914.
Against his better judgement, Detective Inspector Silas Quinn is attending the premiere of the new motion picture by notorious Austrian film-maker Konrad Waechter.
But the glamorous event is interrupted by the piercing screams of a young woman in the street outside.
She has been viciously mutilated in a horrific attack which eerily echoes a macabre act of violence in Waechter's film.
As he questions those who attended the premiere, Quinn's jaundiced view of the fledgling film industry as a business based on illusion and pretence, where no one is what they seem, appears to be justified.
But when members of London's Establishment start to receive bizarre hand-delivered parcels containing the strangest of contents, the investigation takes a disturbing twist.
Severn House Publishers The dark palace: murder and mystery in london, 1914, paperback/r. n. morris
