In the depths of the Crowland Forest, in a disused operating theatre no one remembers exists, a sculptor is making something beautiful.
Leo Bannister hears voices-has heard them for years. Apollo speaks of beauty; His companions, contemptuous and cold, speaks only in riddles. Between them, they have convinced him that his art demands a terrible material: bone, sinew, the architecture of the human body itself. He has already used his wife's as a way to commemorate her. He is looked after by his daughter who believes him to be a genius..
Miles away, in a quiet Herefordshire farmhouse, Inspector George Beauchamp is called to by Dan and Tash to what looks like a suicide-a man run through with a sword, in a house that gives him the creeps because the deceased was an artist obsessed with death. It is the first thread of something he doesn't yet have the language for.
He is not helped by his confederate, Sergeant Brierley, who seems to hinder him at every turn and who has history with the deceased that he doesn't disclose to Beauchamp.
As the distance between the detective and the artist narrows, Beauchamp begins to understand what a strange world he is entering, where art and anatomy intertwine and murder is not a crime but a thing to be used in the creation of beauty and where human life has no intrinsic value. Dust and Shadow asks what's left of a man once his gods have taken everything he loved-and what it costs the ones who look after him.
