Charles Todd

While Ian Rutledge searches for a missing man, Walter Teller, he is attacked by a young man who goes on a murderous spree with victims all resembling Rutledge, but after Teller mysteriously reappears, another woman is found dead and the Teller family is implicated in her death.

Scotland Yard Inspector Ian Rutledge is sent on a diplomatic mission to Cornwall to review the evidence in the deaths of three members of the same family, but his interest is sparked when he realizes that one of the dead is O.A. Manning, a reclusive poet whose writings comforted him while fighting in the trenches of World War I.