It is the second book in the Alexander and Cass Cleave Trilogy, which also contains the novels Eclipse (2000) and Ancient Light (2012).

Axel Vander, famous man of letters and recently widowed, travels to Turin to meet a young woman called Cass Cleave.

Cleave is a literary researcher who has discovered two secrets about Vander's early years in Antwerp.

The novel is partly inspired by two scandals concerning eminent academics that occurred in the 1980s: the posthumous discovery of anti-Semitic texts written during World War II by Yale school literary critic Paul de Man, who had an influential postwar career in the United States; and the murder by Louis Althusser of his wife Hélène Legotien.

Shroud certainly demonstrates (Banville's) ability to generate extreme tension and utterly uncanny atmospheres.