Plot
Set in Victorian England, the series focuses on Cain Hargreaves, the son of Alexis Hargreaves and Alexis's elder sister, Augusta. Abused physically and emotionally by Alexis, twelve-year-old Cain befriends a new servant named Riff, after Riff speaks to him. Cain acknowledges that his father despises him and has been slowly poisoning him with arsenic. When he secretly visits his mother at a mental institution, she mistakes him for Alexis and jumps out the window. Dying, she warns him to escape from Alexis. He returns home and poisons his father. Before Alexis plunges into the sea, he curses his son to have a miserable life and die alone. Cain inherits his father's title of earl as a result of Alexis's presumed death. Years later Cain, now seventeen, solves murders with Riff's help and collects poisons. During one mystery, he adopts young Mary Weather, who he believes is his half-sister. He also encounters his half-brother Jizabel Disraeli, a member of a secret organization that focuses on resurrecting the dead. From him, Cain learns that Alexis had survived his suicide and became the leader of that organization, renaming it Delilah. After the death of the woman that Cain loves, a Delilah "doll" or resurrected corpse surviving on the fresh blood and organs of others, he vows to end Delilah's experiments with the dead.
Read more about this topic: Earl Cain
Famous quotes containing the word plot:
“James’s great gift, of course, was his ability to tell a plot in shimmering detail with such delicacy of treatment and such fine aloofness—that is, reluctance to engage in any direct grappling with what, in the play or story, had actually “taken place”Mthat his listeners often did not, in the end, know what had, to put it in another way, “gone on.””
—James Thurber (1894–1961)
“There saw I how the secret felon wrought,
And treason labouring in the traitor’s thought,
And midwife Time the ripened plot to murder brought.”
—Geoffrey Chaucer (1340?–1400)
“Morality for the novelist is expressed not so much in the choice of subject matter as in the plot of the narrative, which is perhaps why in our morally bewildered time novelists have often been timid about plot.”
—Jane Rule (b. 1931)