A good researcher should be able to plumb the depths of all kinds of darknesses and remain objective. Especially when his bank balance is dwindling with alarming rapidity...
(Phineas Fox Mystery #1)
A tramp runs on to a road as he tries to escape a priest whom he has just seen rape a young girl; he doesn't know it but she is the priests cousin. A car carrying a father and a daughter swerves to avoid him but still hits him; the girl burns to death and it is believed that the other person who dies is her father except that it isn't: it's the tramp. The father loses his memory and so too, later on, does the girl who was raped. No-one knows who the man is so he adopts a name he sees on a gravestone which happens to be the true name of the son of a Russian man who had been set up and sentenced to die for his alleged role in killing the tsar. Both the girl and the man ultimately regain their memories; he is reunited with his wife while she is forced into a confrontation with her rapist that leaves him dead. A tale of how we all construct identities and versions of ourselves just to survive life.