Her dreams of reporting crushed and a marriage proposal looming over her, Catriona struggles to fit back into her dreary life in fashionable society.

Charitable work is her only occupation now. But all too well, because when the impoverished children of Spitalfields stumble upon a corpse, shot dead and abandoned, Catriona cannot very well ignore it—not when the inspector leading the murder inquiry is none other than Marlowe.

Pulled in opposite directions by obligation and ambition, Catriona is drawn back into the winding laneways of a darker side of London. But that darkness shrouds more than one mystery, and with it an abyss of secrets that soon threatens to drown her.