First published 2018
Merrick Tremayne can barely walk. A leg injury has left him stranded at the family estate in Cornwall, watching the place decay around him while unexplained things happen in the grounds. When the India Office offers him a way out, he takes it, even knowing the odds. The job is straightforward on paper: travel deep into Peru and retrieve cinchona, the source of quinine, which the British Empire desperately needs to fight malaria. In practice, nearly every man sent before him has not come back. Merrick makes it to a remote Andean village at the edge of the Amazon, where a priest named Raphael lives at the center of stories the locals tell in low voices. Impossible disappearances. Woods that punish trespassers. Statues that move. Merrick is a practical man and he tries to sort legend from fact, but the line keeps shifting. Slowly he understands that Raphael knows something about the Tremayne family that Merrick does not, something earlier generations of his family came here to find. Whatever it is, it matters more than quinine. It is also far more likely to get him killed. Set in 1859, this is a novel about loyalty, inheritance, and the cost of believing what you see.
Genres: historical-fiction, adventure, fantasy, dark-fantasy, mystery-thriller
Vibes: atmospheric, dark, eerie, mysterious, suspenseful, thought-provoking
Tropes: family-inheritance, fish-out-of-water, hidden-truth, unreliable-reality
Setting: Cornwall, Peru, Andean village, Amazon, British Empire
Period: 1859, 19th century
352 pages · Paperback · Bloomsbury Publishing
Content warnings: colonialism, death