Though William Monk knows the streets of 1860s London like the back of his hand, the River Thames—with its wharf rats, smugglers, and plunderers—is a new world. But in this 14th novel in the series, the former policeman is in dire need of employment, and shipping magnate Clement Louvain wants him to investigate the theft of African ivory from his schooner Maude Idris. But Monk wonders why Louvain didn't go to the River Police—and what his connection is to a desperately ill woman who appears in Hester's clinic.

"With her visionary sensibility, Anne Perry is the master of the 'you are there' school of hist-myst storytelling…. [Here are] scenes that could have come out of Dickens's Our Mutual Friend."—NYTBR