Simon Cannick, with the dubious assistance of possible extraterrestrial influence, seems to have largely recovered from his temporary death, his peculiar and continual lapses into dreamspace notwithstanding. However, fate, like the neider, is hydra-formed. Douglas Jefferson is willing to play dirty in the long game of inheritance and the longer game of resentment; Simon’s half-sister, Marianne, and her unruly female descendants arrive at St. Madoc en masse and prove far from gentle in their attempts to unearth family secrets; and now Rome wishes to speak to Simon, too, or at least one Father Thomas Mallory, of the Order of Preachers, who might have some interesting information to share, if Simon is willing to disclose what he knows in return.

The third and concluding instalment in the cosmic labyrinth of Brian Stableford’s Morgan’s Fork series offers no easy answers. Instead, Simon Cannick is drawn, almost against his will, into a tenebrous enlightenment, guided only by the dreaming, alien voices of The Truths of Darkness.