The Angel Maker

Doctor Victor Hoppe comes back to the small village where he grew up, after many years away. He brings three triplets with him, and all of them share his hare lip. The children are silent and almost never leave the house, and the villagers watch the newcomers with curiosity and suspicion.

Slowly the doctor earns their trust. A run of apparently miraculous cures helps, and so do the stories he tells about the wife he lost. He hires Charlotte, a former schoolmistress, to look after the children, and gives her strict rules for raising them.

The longer Charlotte works in the house, the more she doubts that the children or their father are what they appear to be.

The book also looks back at Hoppe's past. As a boy, he was shut away in a harsh children's home run by nuns, where his autism and hare lip led staff to treat him as an idiot. After he was rescued, he vowed to reject the religious zealotry he had seen and give his life to science.

He became a geneticist, and his urge to correct nature's mistakes ended in ruin and disgrace. Charlotte's suspicions point toward what that urge has led him to do in the village.