"There is no Light without Darknesse and no Substance without Shaddowe". So proclaims Nicholas Dyer, assistant to Sir Christopher Wren and man with a commission to build seven London churches to stand as beacons of the enlightenment. But Dyer plans to conceal a dark secret at the heart of each church - to create a forbidding architecture that will survive for eternity. Two hundred and fifty years later, London detective Nicholas Hawksmoor is investigating a series of gruesome murders on the sites of certain eighteenth-century churches - crimes that make no sense to the modern mind ... Peter Ackroyd was born in London in 1949. A novelist, biographer and historian, he has been the literary editor of the Spectator and chief book reviewer for the Тле Times, as well as writing several highly acclaimed books including a biography of Charles Dickens and London: The Biography. He lives in London. Barn grew up in sun-bleached Leek, Staffordshire, where he played with Lego,...