The canal that runs through the centre of Sheffield used to carry the industrial
freight for the steel industry is being renovated for leisure pursuits,
but away from the city centre developments, the canal is overgrown, run
down and deserted. An arts trust has established a small but innovative
gallery in one of the old warehouses by the canal, and Eliza Eliot, the
curator, sees her career about to take off when she's given the opportunity
to show the latest exhibition by well-known artist Daniel Flynn. The exhibition
is a series of reworkings of Brueghel's painting, The Triumph of Death,
and Eliza begins to realize that Flynn may have more complex motives for
allowing his work to be shown at a small gallery in a provincial city.
But she is distracted, first by the repercussions of the murder, four years
before, of a friend's daughter, followed by the friend's death in a car
accident just before the book opens. Then a young woman who lives in one
of the flats above the gallery is found dead in the canal, while a teenage
girl also goes missing in an apparently unrelated case. Events take a sinister
turn at the gallery as the nightmare images from Daniel Flynn's exhibition
start to spill out into the real world. Is this the work of a psychopath,
or is there some link between present violence and the tragedy of four
years ago?