When Benedict Doyle finds himself the owner of his great-grandfather's North London house, he is dismayed. For it was in that house, as a frightened eight-year-old, that the strange glimpses into his great-grandfather's life began; eerie shutter-flash images that have gradually revealed sinister darkness in his family's past.

Through those darkness runs the grisly thread of an old legend about a chess set - thirty-two carved figures believed to possess a dark power, but shut away in the forgotten library of a tumbledown Irish castle for many decades.

When Michael Flint, meeting Benedict in Oxford, starts to research his story, chilling facts begin to emerge - facts that suggest the old legend contains a disturbing reality.

And when Nell West - no stranger to the eeriness of old properties - begins to compile an inventory of Holly Lodge's contents for her antique business, it seems that the chess set's malevolence might be reaching out to the present.