Elzware

Daleclay - a town in the late forties of the previous century.

Following the death of his closest friend and comrade, in what was declared to be a freak-accident during the Second World-War, Jonah Elzware - an essentially individualistic and non-conformist veteran, notorious for both his incurable romanticism as well as his open distrust towards any form of authority - returns to the town in which he was raised, after a prolonged and unexplained absence. The purpose of Jonah's return to Daleclay is apparently two-fold: assuming proprietorship of the home and hotel which he recently inherited from a deceased relative, and also fulfilling the last wish of his fallen comrade by acting as an unofficial guardian and mentor to the latter's now-teenage son.

The superficially mundane and 'run-of-the-mill' town soon finds itself becoming rapidly unhinged, however, upon the arrival of a highly eccentric yet wholly controversial public figure to Jonah's hotel, and the gruesome murder of a celebrated, local matriarch which occurs shortly afterwards - a bloodied and folded tarot card at the scene prompting the perpetrator to be at once dubbed 'the Tarot-Killer.'

Within a short span of time, the Tarot-Killer strikes again; house divided against house, a visibly-ineffective police department itself now on the verge, and all other established avenues of help becoming exhausted and obsolete, an unlikely alliance of residents from the darker corners of Daleclay desperately bands together, in hope of unmasking the killer and bringing the murders to an end - only to instead gradually uncover a truth much more direful, yet infinitely more tragic, than initially conceived.