The Quincunx

A tour de force of mystery, intrigue, and passionate revenge, The Quincunx is an ingenious modern twist on the grand fictional tradition of Charles Dickens and Wilkie Collins. Charles Palliser unfolds an epic story of murder, disinheritance, and deception that knits all levels of English society together in a mesmerizing, intricately crafted plot. Searching for clues to his origins, John Huffam, a young man from the north of England, comes to believe that he is the victim of a vast and ancient conspiracy, and that only by claiming his mystery-enshrouded birthright can he escape it. His quest for the truth draws him from the remote countryside of his childhood into the violent and corrupt London underworld of the Late Regency—a world of poverty and fear for many, of fabulous wealth and luxury for the few. Here John finds that nothing is safe from the laws of supply and demand—the living and the dead, loyalty, friendship, and even justice itself. Each time he believes that he has eluded the conspiracy, its tentacles seem to entrap him and those dearest to him, destroying them or turning them against him. But is there a plot or are the connections he keeps finding merely coincidences? To answer all of his questions and solve the mysteries of his birth, he decides that, at peril of his life, he must uncover the darkest secrets of his family's past. And with the obsessive logic of a nightmare, the figure of the quincunx, a figure of five parts, appears at every crucial turning point in John's quest. Herein lies the secret not only of John's identity but of the crime that stained his family with blood on his parents' wedding night and for generations before that. The Quincunx combines the narrative thrust of the Victorian novel with the spellbinding ingenuity of a modern whodunnit—indeed, many of the clues to the mysteries that John confronts are to be found in the illustrative clues throughout the novel. Riveting in its suspense, scrupulously accurate in its period detail, and daringly original in form, The Quincunx is that rarest of literary achievements: a superbly written work of fiction that is impossible to put down.