While on routine patrol in the tinder-dry Topanga Canyon, environmental scientist Rafael Salazar expects to find animal poachers, not a dilapidated antique steamer trunk. Inside the peculiar case, he discovers a journal, written by the renowned Robert Louis Stevenson, which divulges ominous particulars about his creation of THE STRANGE CASE OF DR. JEKYLL AND MR. HYDE. It also promises to reveal a terrible secret --- the identity of Jack the Ripper. Meanwhile, though, a mysterious flask containing the last drops of the grisly potion that inspired JEKYLL AND HYDE and spawned London’s most infamous killer has gone missing. And it has definitely fallen into the wrong hands.

As war rages in 1944, lieutenant Lucas Athan recovers a sarcophagus excavated from an Egyptian tomb. Shipped to Princeton University for study, the box contains mysteries that only Lucas, aided by brilliant archaeologist Simone Rashid, can unlock. These mysteries may, in fact, defy --- or fulfill --- the dire prophecies of Albert Einstein himself. Struggling to decipher the sarcophagus’s strange contents, Lucas and Simone unwittingly release forces for both good and unmitigated evil. The fate of the world hangs not only on Professor Einstein’s secret research but also on Lucas’s ability to defeat an unholy adversary more powerful than anything he ever imagined.

Nearly 100 years ago, a desperate young woman crawled ashore on a desolate arctic island, carrying a terrible secret and a mysterious, emerald-encrusted cross. A century later, acts of man, nature and history converge on that same forbidding shore with a power sufficient to shatter civilization as we know it.