The Flight of the Falcon - Daphne Du Maurier

As a tour guide, Armino Fabbio leads a pleasant, if uneventful life - until he becomes circumstantially involved in the death of a peasant in Rome. The woman, he gradually learns, was his family's beloved servant many years ago before, in his native town of Ruffano. Fabbio returns to his birthplace, and finds it is haunted by the phantom of his brother, Aldo, who was shot down in flames during the war.

Over five hundred years before, the sinister Duke Claudio, known as The Falcon, lived his twisted, brutal life, preying on the people of Ruffano. The town seems to have forgotten its violent history, but have things really changed? The parallels between the past and present become ever more evident.