An international sports star is found murdered--her face mutilated in a bizarre, ritualistic manner. What is the significance of the poetic text the killer has left at the crime scene? Why did he surgically remove the victim's left eye? And can a Cambridge lecturer help the police reconstruct the killer's fantasy in time to save her own life? As Inspector John Underwood and his team work frantically to piece together the last hours of Olympic athlete Lucy Harrington, events take an unexpected turn. Harrington's murderer contacts English literature lecturer Heather Stussmann and invites her to explain his actions to the police. But another murder will take place before Stussmann finds the key to understanding the killer's terrifying motive, which lies buried in the works of a poet who has been dead for nearly four hundred years. In The Yeare's Midnight, author Ed O'Connor has created a villain with an intellect as cunning as it is monstrous. Donne's cerebral poems, such as "The Feaver" and "The First Anniversary," are ingeniously transmogrified into a thriller that melds metaphysics and mortality.