They never tell you, those poets and those lovers, that hatred and agony can take on solid substance on a green and gold spring morning, or that it can smell of newly-fried bacon and eggs.
(Nell West/Michael Flint #1)
A young girl sees her mother being murdered without quite realising who has committed the murder: her father. She thinks it is an intruder, a clockmaker, while her father, thinking that both the clockmaker and she herself know what he's done sets out to neutralise them; he places his daughter in an asylum and kills the clockmaker. The latter's corpse is found decades later and, in the intervening years, he's wandered the area as a ghost looking for the girl and trying to protect her. She doesn't know what he's doing though and, while she lives, she lives in fear of him.