"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 anarchists are at work. But what Pitt discovers is far more disturbing: the explosion was not a terrorist...

Once again, that incomparable team of sleuths Inspector Thomas Pitt and his young wife, Charlotte, set themselves against a vicious murderer. As More ... the elegant masks of the wellborn suspects slip, it becomes appallingly clear that something ugly lurks behind the handsome fa?ades of Paragon Walk?something that may lead to more scandal, and more murder.

Inspector Thomas Pitt learns that a boy, clearly from the upper classes, has been found in the filthy sewers of Bluegate Fields, one of London's most dangerous slums. And the boy had been violated before he was murdered. The boy's family refuses to answer the police's questions, and the inspector begins to wonder what secrets they are trying to hide.

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...