For most Londoners, great houses were inscrutable bastions of privilege and power. All the more shocking then was the freshly dead body sprawled on the Bedford Square doorstep of General Brandon Balantyne — an affront to every respectable sensibility. The general denies all knowledge of the bloody-knuckled, shabbily dressed victim who has so rudely come to death outside his home. But Superintendent Thomas Pitt of Bow Street Police Station cannot believe him. For in the dead man's pocket he finds a rare snuffbox that recently graced the general's study. He must tread lightly, however, lest his investigation trigger a tragedy of immense proportions, ensnaring honorable men like flies in a web of terror. Pitt's clever wife, Charlotte, becomes his full partner in probing this masterpiece of evil, spawned by an amorality greater than they can imagine.