The character of a novel written in the past comes to life in the present to torment the author, reliving and revisiting with her the crime story.

Charles Augustus Howell was John Ruskin’s secretary, agent and model for Dante Gabriel Rossetti, and exhumer of Lizzie Siddal. But he is also said to have been a master blackmailer and a forger of works of art. This is the story of a Portuguese by birth, who never managed to be accepted as the Englishman he always was, of a character whose story was written on the strength of rumours rather than facts, of the man whom Arthur Conan Doyle called the worst man in London.