"He knew that animals could sense when a natural disaster was about to occur and humans were often given warning by observing unusual animal behavior. But there were no animals in the mine. --- Maybe I'm the animal, he thought, maybe what I'm feeling right now is what animals feel before a disaster."

ACROSS THE DARK begins in the 1920s with the story of Hank and Eliza Steadman, two people deeply in love, and the tale of Hank and his ill-fated crew of miners, who go into the mine one day and never come out. The one surviving miner, John Sanger, claims that Hank took his men to the wrong part of the mine and he alone is responsible for the deaths of his men. But is Sanger's story true, or is he lying to cover up his own sordid secret?

Rich, round, and loveably eccentric, Cuthbert Sweet conforms to no stereotype. He likes people and people like him - well, everyone except for a few. Our not-so-swashbuckling hero has inherited the old mine and stumbles onto something that could clear up the fifty-year-old mystery. His cousins, the children of the sole survivor of the long ago disaster, will do anything necessary in order to keep Cuthbert from exposing the truth. Anything.

But Cuthbert has always been full of surprises.