October 1891 A young girl, Leonie Vernier, and her brother, Anatole, are invited to leave the gas-lit streets of Paris and travel south to a mysterious country house - La Domaine de la Cade - near Carcassonne There, in the ancient, dark woods, Leonie comes across a ruined sepulchre and is drawn into a centuries-old mystery of murder, ghosts and a strange set of tarot cards that seem to hold enormous power over life and death October 2007 Meredith Martin decides to take a break from her research trip in Paris - where she is studying Claude Debussy - and head down south to a beautiful hotel in the woods She becomes fascinated by the history of the place and particularly by the tragic events of one Halloween night more than a century before that shocked the small community Thus her fate becomes entwined with that of Leonie But it is only when she too stumbles over a secluded glade in the forest that she realises that the secrets it contains are far from dead and buried