The Dark Clue

“A luscious Victorian thriller” that takes its cue from Wilkie Collins’s gothic masterpiece, The Woman in White (The New York Times Book Review).

Walter Hartright and his sister-in-law Marian have been commissioned to write the definitive biography of the great Romantic landscape artist J. M. W. Turner, one of the boldest and most elusive geniuses of his age. But the only way to draw such a mysterious life out of the shadows is to venture into them themselves. The more Walter and Marian discover about Turner—the depraved company he kept, the sordid places he frequented, and his mysterious link to an unspeakable act—the more difficult it becomes for Walter and Marian to escape the pull of Turner’s dangerous influences, both past and present.

Hailed by the Independent as “devilishly clever,” James Wilson’s epistolary literary thriller weds the characters from one of the best-known sensation novels of the nineteenth century with real historical figures of the era. For readers “seeking a dark tangled tale for an agreeably stormy night, The Dark Clue just might be the solution” (The Boston Globe).