At Oxford, Robert Merrick notices a light burning late in Antony Severin’s rooms.

That is how it begins: with incense, shadows, an impossible death in the college backwater, and a young man too beautiful, too charming, and too strange to be trusted.

Antony Severin is the adopted son of the great Egyptologist Sir Michael Severin. He is wealthy, brilliant, adored by women, and disliked by almost every man who meets him. To the world, he is merely eccentric. To Robert Merrick, he is something worse.

Then a young woman dies in a London hospital with the marks of invisible hands on her throat.

Sir Michael Severin dies the same way.

And Myra Devereux, Sir Michael’s niece and Robert’s beloved, begins to dream of white hands, a green ring, and a presence moving through the dark.

Robert’s father, Dr. Bruce Merrick, has spent a lifetime studying Egyptian magic as scholarship. Now he fears that scholarship was never safely dead. Somewhere in the lost rites of ancient Egypt lies the secret of the Book of Thoth — and Antony Severin may have found it.

As Robert and his father follow the trail from Oxford to London, from Kensington drawing rooms to Egypt’s tomb-haunted past, they uncover a truth no court would believe and no modern mind is prepared to face. Antony Severin is not merely a murderer. He is the heir to a power older than history, armed with the knowledge of a priesthood that should have remained buried forever.

And Myra is his next victim.

Gothic, atmospheric, and charged with occult menace, THE MASK OF SET is a tale of ancient evil in modern England — where beauty conceals corruption, reason must confront sorcery, and the deadliest enemy is the one no one will believe exists.