Something is troubling Inspector Henry Cutter. Sergeant Gideon Bliss is accustomed to his ill-tempered outbursts, but lately the inspector has grown silent and withdrawn. Then, the murders begin. The first to die is the a decorated but obscure civil servant who long ago retired to tend his orchids. If the motive for his killing is a mystery, the manner of his death is more bewildering still. The victims that follow suffer similar fates, their deaths gruesome but immaculately orchestrated. As the hunt for this implacable adversary mounts, the inspector’s gloom deepens, and to Sergeant Bliss, his methods seem as mystifying as the crimes themselves. Why is he digging through dusty archives while the murderer stalks further victims? To find the answers, the meek and hapless sergeant must step out of the inspector’s shadow.

In the dead of night, shots ring out over the grounds of a sprawling English estate. The world-weary butler Eustace recognizes the gunman --- his longtime employer, Mr. Crowe --- and knows he must think and act quickly. Who is the man lying dead on the lawn? Who is the woman in his company? Can he clean up his master’s mess like he always has before? Or will this bring a new kind of reckoning? Mr. Crowe was once famed for his gifts --- unaccountable gifts, known only to the members of a secretive order. But he has long since retreated from that glittering world and has been content to live quietly, his great library gathering dust and his once magnificent gardens growing wild. He has left the past behind. Until now.

London, 1893: High up in a house on a dark, snowy night, a lone seamstress stands by a window. So begins the swirling, serpentine world of Paraic O’Donnell’s Victorian-inspired mystery, the story of a city cloaked in shadow, but burning with questions: Why does the seamstress jump from the window? Why is a cryptic message stitched into her skin? And how is she connected to a rash of missing girls, all of whom seem to have disappeared under similar circumstances? On the case is Inspector Cutter, a detective as sharp and committed to his work as he is wryly hilarious. Gideon Bliss, a Cambridge dropout in love with one of the missing girls, stumbles into a role as Cutter’s sidekick. And clever young journalist Octavia Hillingdon sees the case as a chance to tell a story that matters.