At two minutes to six on December 27th 1908 the lives of three people become inextricably bound together by the trajectory of a snowball. There is ten-year old Dunstable Ramsay; his 'lifelong friend and enemy' Percy Boyd Staunton; and, Paul Dempster prematurely born when his pregnant mother is struck by Percy's icy missile.
'I was never so amazed in my life as when the Sniffer drew his concealed weapon from its case and struck me to the ground, stone dead.' So begins the story of Connor 'Gil' Gilmartin when he catches his wife in flagrante with the Sniffer, his former colleague and now his murderer.
When Father Hobbes mysteriously dies at the high altar on Good Friday, Dr Jonathan Hullah - whose holistic ideas have earned him the soubriquet 'cunning man' - wants to know why. But it is only through looking back at his own long life that answers are forthcoming.
In the small university town of Salterton, Ontario, dreams are quietly taking shape, or falling apart. There's the Salterton Little Theatre Company, in which professional director Valentine Rich is tormented by the amateurish efforts of his actors.
The University of St John and the Holy Ghost (known affectionately as Spook) has a problem - and an opportunity. Strange, eccentric art patron and collector Francis Cornish has died and faculty members have been made executors of his complicated will.
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