Jeremy Lavelle, leader of the esoteric Egyptian Society the Order of the True Sphinx, had illegally purchased the mummy of Aj-Merak, an ancient Egyptian scribe, in its three and a half thousand year old sarcophagus.

At a secret gathering of his Society, watched by his enthralled followers, he had opened the coffin, and unwrapped the mummy.

Whilst the head was that of the ancient scribe, his shrivelled and desiccated, rotted brown face staring eyelessly up from his Middle Kingdom coffin, from the neck down, wrapped up in the layers of bandages, was not the mummified remains which they had expected.

Stunned and horrified, Lavelle and a helper had then proceeded to extricate the bloody, a decapitated corpse of a recently-killed man.

The group behind the acquisition of the mummy, anxious to keep the police out of the case, enlist the help of a private investigator - Adam Blake.

For Blake, the case offer an escape from his more mundane work of digging into match fixing in illegal boxing, and has no qualms about downing tools on his other cases to look into the mystery of the contaminated sarcophagus.

However, once in the employment of the society, a sceptical Blake finds himself at odds with the superstitions of his bosses’ beliefs in the ancient Egyptian occult.

Bemused by the methods and dogmas these apparent men of industry indulge in, Blake sets about methodically digging into the murky world of the Order’s associates.

He soon realises just how nonsensical a world he has marched into, leaving him to questioning his own beliefs.

A Murder Most Macabre is a gripping mystery that plunges the reader into a dark and unknown world.

"A gripping page-turner." - Robert Foster, best-selling author of 'The Lunar Code'.

Edmund Glasby grew up in Morecambe and studied at Oxford. He is the author of several books including Disciples of a Dark God.