I recently read The Quincunx by Charles Palliser and loved it, so I ordered a used copy of The Unburied from play.com. It arrived this week and is now near the top of my TBR pile.

When Dr Courtine is invited to spend the days before Christmas with an old friend he is keen to accept, even though it is twenty years since they last met. On the night Courtine arrives, Austin tells him the story of the town ghost, a story of deadly rivalry and murder two centuries old. Courtine’s real reason for the visit is to pursue an even older mystery. For, if he can track down an elusive eleventh-century manuscript, the existence of which only he believes in, he hopes to dispose of a deadly rivalry of his own. So intent is he upon these ancient mysteries that he fails to notice the malign conspiracy into which he is being lured…