Hawksmoor

'There is no Light without Darknesse and no Substance without Shaddowe' So proclaims Nicholas Dyer, assistant to Sir Christopher Wren and the man with a commission to build seven London churches to stand as beacons of the enlightenment. But Dyer plans to conceal a dark secret at the heart of each church - to create a forbidding architecture that will survive for eternity. Two hundred and fifty years later, London detective Nicholas Hawksmoor is investigating a series of gruesome murders on the sites of certain eighteenth-century churches - crimes that make no sense to the modern mind... Equally praised for his formally experimental fiction, his inventive biographies and his ambitious histories (particularly of his home and birthplace of London), Peter Ackroyd is arguably one of the greatest writers of his generation. With a particular partiality for Victorian and Gothic influences, his most famous novels include: Hawksmoor, Dan Leno and the Limehouse Golem, The English Ghost and his own re-telling of The Canterbury Tales and The Death of King Arthur. His non-fiction ranges widely, encompassing: London the Biography, London the Concise Biography, London Under, Thames: Sacred River, Venice: Pure City, a multi-volume history of London (Foundation, Tudors, Civil War, Revolution) and Queer City  as well as biographies of Chaucer, Shakespeare, Dickens, Blake, Charlie Chaplin and Alfred Hitchcock .