The King's Evil: A Novel (without dust jacket)

The Story

'Joseph Malderoyce is a philosophical man with a taste for Mondrian and something of an obsession with tuberculosis. When he inherits a large sum of money, Joseph leaves his stultifying job at a law firm and moves to an unremarkable town in the far north of an unnamed country. There, in a house on the edge of a pine forest, he lives in solitude until the morning he finds a badly beaten young boy asleep on his porch.