Wytchmoor Peak.
The police at Witchmoor Edge, West Yorkshire, are trying to trace missing schoolgirl 13 year old Chelsey Bradon. Into this hunt is catapulted retired DCI David Cooke. He phones his successor, Millicent Hampshire with a strange story about needing unspecified occult help because his neighbour Athena Harcourt-Jones has stirred up some kind of unpleasant entity with her excavations and research on her newly acquired Temple Farm. Investigation quickly establishes that she has disappeared and is, by a puzzling coincidence the last person to see the missing schoolgirl before she too disappeared.
CDI Millicent Hampshire pushes on with the police investigations but calls on Tobias N'Dibe, a friend with serious occult interests: He's acquainted with Athena and knows her as an occultist and investigate whatever it is she has stirred up. A check on Athena's house near York turns up the body of a man who seems to have died of fright: no injuries and o medical explanation but a look of horror on his face. A search of Temple Farm uncovers another body. It too was someone who with no visible injuries but a look of horro on his face – did he also died of fright. There is, however, still no sign of Athena Harcourt-Jones.
Chelsey turns up unexpectedly and claims she had been held prisoner with Athena, but escaped … but that lady disappeared again … as had the retired DCI. Both are tracked down in a story that ends that a blaze of both natural and supernatural fury. As N'Dibe insists karma is satisfied and the universe rebalanced.
Note that Mike Crowson is 40 years a student of the occult and is a high adept of the Golden Dawn.
