‘In a prologue set in 1901 London, a woman is apparently killed outside her home after her gold watch falls out of her pocket. Flash forward to 1991… playwright André Lévêque seeks help identifying a film he saw at a friend’s house when he was 10, whose story seems to match the circumstances of the 1901 crime. And in the winter of 1911, Victoria Sanders… has invited guests to her English country house. Burns investigates after someone takes a fatal fall on the house’s snowy grounds. Since the only footprints in the snow near the body are the victim’s, it appears the death—from impact with a rock—was accidental. That the deceased was reading Robert Chambers’s macabre classic, The King in Yellow, could be a clue to foul play. Halter links everything logically, further burnishing his reputation as a modern master of the impossible crime mystery.’ Publishers Weekly.  And, in a further impossibility, a woman is apparently pushed from a cliff quarry with nobody closer than thirty feet away.