Tim Heath

A local child has gone missing. For the family, it is a tragedy. For former celebrity psychic Dame Alvera, it is an opportunity to claw back her fame. But in the dingy confines of a small-town psychic fayre, can she still make a human connection?

Leonard Brock talks shop in a fly on the wall view of St. James Working Men’s Club. The arrival of a visitor disrupts the maudlin equilibrium of the evening.

Roberte, 40, resistant during the war, Calvinist and anticlerical, is deputy to the chamber and inspector of Censorship. She married Octave, an old Catholic aesthete, professor of canon law, whom she saves from impeachment for collaboration during the war. He submits his wife to a perverse custom: the laws of hospitality or prostitution of the wife by the husband.

Rupert Siskin, a humble food taster from London, becomes an everyday villain to impress the woman he loves, Lisa. He eventually gets into politics to become a perfect thief.