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The story is based on four characters, 'Doc' Harvey, Bill Leggett the Doc's foster child, Rob Heath, the squire's son, and Lena an unaccomplished artist and unconventional thinker. The book is set in the 1940s in the village of Howdean in the south of England where Bill and Rob, who were at Cambridge University together, have used some capital to invent a replicating machine. The novel considers the ethics, advantages and dangers of such a device and is narrated by the Doc in a kind of Dr Watson/Sherlock Holmes style. Science is on the verge of a revolution, the cutting-edge new replication process is invented, and any matter can be reproduced - Shakespeare's signature, works of art, even perhaps a human being? When a brilliant scientist believes that this perfect replication process offers the solution to an excruciating love triangle, the limits of the new technology are tested, and impossible questions of identity and originality threaten to tear apart the best-laid plans of paradise. The book is adventurous in that it deals with nakedness, suicide and even skirts on child abuse, which for 1949 when it was published was very brave, and Lena is an unconventional female character. 300 page paperback.