The Draughtsman's Contract

A landscape of lust and cunning.

A baroque, deliberately enigmatic mystery that uses 17th-century aesthetics and sexual intrigue as a puzzle-box for intellectual and moral ambiguity.

R. Neville, a brash young draftsman, is hired to make a dozen landscape illustrations at the estate of Mr Herbert and his wife Virginia. Aside from monetary compensation, the arrangement includes a sexual liaison offered to Neville by Virginia while her estranged husband is away. But when the murdered body of Mr Herbert is discovered at the estate, mysterious clues found in Neville's drawings point to the identity of the killer.