Special Branch officer Thomas Pitt, hastening to rendezvous with a secret informant, arrives a second too late, preceded by a knife-wielding assassin. As he pursues the killer and the information he needs to stop a devastating plot against the British government, his clever wife Charlotte heads to Dublin to investigate a case involving Pitt's supervisor, Victor Narraway.

When low-life moneylender William Weems is found murdered, there are few to mourn his passing. But when Inspector Pitt finds a list containing the names of some of London's most distinguished gentlemen in the murdered man's office, he recognizes the smell of blackmail.

Thomas Pitt, once a lowly policeman, is now the powerful head of Britain's Special Branch, and some people fear that he may have been promoted beyond his abilities. He, too, feels painful moments of self-doubt, especially as rumors reach him of a plot to blow up connections on the Dover-London rail line--on which Austrian duke Alois Habsburg is soon to travel to visit his royal English kin. Why would anyone destroy an entire train to kill one obscure...

Investigating evidence of a violent struggle at the home of Ministry of Defense member Dudley Kynaston, Pitt and the Special Branch discover the brutally murdered body of a young woman before realizing that Kynaston is not who he appears to be.

Charlotte Pitt's mother, Caroline, has traveled with husband Joshua Fielding and his theatrical troupe to Whitby, the Yorkshire fishing village where Dracula first touched English soil in the sensational novel. Joshua has arranged to produce a stage adaptation of the book, but the project is a disaster. Then a black-cloaked stranger emerges from a snowstorm who turns out to be a theatrical genius. But at the same time, a brooding evil makes itself...

"In this, the thirty-first installment of the New York Times bestselling Charlotte and Thomas Pitt mystery series, Commander Thomas Pitt, head of Special Branch, is called to the scene of a brutal explosion in the heart of London. The bomb was set off during an important--and secret--police raid, killing several officers, and the government suspects anarachists are at work. But what Pitt discovers is far more disturbing: the explosion was not a terrorist...