Devil's Sonata

Beauregard Abbey is an elite boarding school in the wilds of North Yorkshire – a school built in the ruins of a monastery renowned for corruption and the study of dark magic until its destruction by Henry VIII five centuries ago. When a grimoire, a book of evil spells, is unearthed in the abbey church, the school turns to an expert – Zuleika Rathbone, neuroscientist and historian, scholar of witchcraft, ghosts and other such creations and delusions of the mind.

Or so she thinks. On the day of her arrival at Beauregard, she unearths an eighteenth-century violin, walled away for three hundred years, and the thin veneer hiding Beauregard’s cursed, necromantic past begins to crumble. As a brilliant young violinist, picked to play the instrument, becomes cruel and malevolent, and the school’s production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream turns darker and darker, Zuleika finds herself – and the school – in the grip of an ancient evil…