1800. On the windswept moors of Brittany, renegade priest Gabriel Le Brec and Count Filhol de Treguern embark on a scheme to defraud an insurance company by faking the death of the latter. This sets in motion a danse macabre of murders, betrayals, people who change their names, lost birth certificates, false testimonies, an Ann Radcliffe romance, a Miltonian struggle between Good and Evil and an impossible phantasmagoria of living men who pretend to be dead and dead men who return to claim vengeance. "The whole plot is a duel between two insanely obsessive sorcerers, Commander Malo Treguern and Dowager Fran oise Le Brec. Were it not for F val's repeated assurances that Malo has Destiny and God on his side, while the Dowager is the Devil's pawn, the reader would surely be at a loss to know which of the two to support." Brian Stableford