A prison cell holds many ghosts, but none so terrifying as a letter from the dead. After seventeen years behind bars for his brother’s murder, Ethan Mitchell receives an impossible message in handwriting he would recognize anywhere—his dead brother Martin’s.

“Time will not save you. The first Wednesday after your release, St Mark’s Church, three in the afternoon.”

Bewildered, Ethan keeps the mysterious appointment, stepping into the cool darkness of St. Mark’s exactly as instructed. The impossible confrontation ends in a hail of bullets, leaving Ethan bleeding on consecrated ground—a final punishment for a crime he believed he had already paid for.

Detective Inspector Keith Tremayne and Sergeant Clare Yarwood find a peculiar murder scene: a recently released convict, killed execution-style in church, with an expression suggesting he had seen a ghost. Their investigation uncovers the original crime—the murder of Martin Mitchell and disappearance of a fortune in stolen gold bars never recovered.

But if Ethan truly killed Martin, who lured him to the church? Who fired those fatal shots? And where is the missing gold that multiple generations of the Mitchell family have died trying to locate?

As Tremayne follows the bloody trail, more bodies accumulate—all connected to the Mitchell brothers and all meeting violent ends. The gold’s curse stretches across decades, transforming treasure hunters into victims.