The old Folly has not been used since those twenty young men, full of ideals for the century that was still in its spring, marched out to war in 1914. When the last survivor of the Lakenham Set, General Reginald Maitland, enters with his granddaughter Gemma on his hundredth birthday, it is here, surrounded by memories of the past, that he entrusts to her one final, vital mission: to find Ted Parsons. Ted Parsons' life is the key to a fortune left by the Lakenham Set, intended to commemorate the century's achievements and their own ideals, but that quaint concept is now clouded by private ambitions among the narrowing number of contenders for the money. Parsons disappeared shortly after the Second World War, so is he dead or alive?Gemma's quest takes her to Florence, where she falls headlong into a maze where nothing and no one is as it seems. As she battles her way through a web in which her very survival is at stake if she makes a wrong decision, Gemma is forced to ask whether the deaths that follow in the wake of her investigation are accidental, natural - or something far more sinister . . .

The old Folly has not been used since those twenty young men, full of ideals for the century that was still in its spring, marched out to war in 1914. When the last survivor of the Lakenham Set, General Reginald Maitland, enters with his granddaughter Gemma on his hundredth birthday, it is here, surrounded by memories of the past, that he entrusts to her one final, vital mission: to find Ted Parsons. Ted Parsons' life is the key to a fortune left by the Lakenham Set, intended to commemorate the century's achievements and their own ideals, but that quaint concept is now clouded by private ambitions among the narrowing number of contenders for the money. Parsons disappeared shortly after the Second World War, so is he dead or alive?Gemma's quest takes her to Florence, where she falls headlong into a maze where nothing and no one is as it seems. As she battles her way through a web in which her very survival is at stake if she makes a wrong decision, Gemma is forced to ask whether the deaths that follow in the wake of her investigation are accidental, natural - or something far more sinister . . .