Their resemblance to each other is uncanny, and they spend the next few hours talking and drinking - until at last John falls into a drunken stupor. It's to be his last carefree moment, for when he wakes, Jean has stolen his identity and disappeared. So the Englishman steps into the Frenchman's shoes, and faces a variety of perplexing roles - as owner of a chateau, director of a failing business, head of a fractious family, and master of nothing.Gripping and complex, The Scapegoat is a masterful exploration of doubling and identity, and of the dark side of the self.

    Saved from Cromwell’s Irish massacres by her nurse, saved from starvation by a Dutch sea captain… Her future and any possible lasting happiness depended entirely on a ‘glove marriage’ to a man who was no more than a name. The Dutch East Indies, in the seventeenth century, were lands of legendary riches; of ‘nutmeg princes;’ of fortunes and family empires built on barbaric plantations and slavery. And amid the extravagance, the cruelty, the bizarre customs, perhaps the strangest events of all were the curious weddings that sent girls half-way around the world to husbands they had never seen. Julia, brave and stoical with a stormy and turbulent history behind her, took her ‘glove’—of yellow, pearl-sewn silk—and began the journey to the island of Rua, to a land of seeming paradise where nothing was exactly as it appeared.

    Or did she?Lies abound in this strange and frightening place, but seeking the truth could lead Jennifer to her own violent death.