In the plague-stricken London of 1665, St. Paul's Cathedral is crumbling after decades of neglect. Some citizens want to repair the historic edifice, others prefer to demolish it—and there are those on both sides who will stop at nothing to get their way. Meanwhile, large sums of money have disappeared, key people have mysteriously vanished, and an unidentified skeleton is discovered in another man's grave. Making his 12th outing (after The Chelsea Strangler), a reluctant Chaloner returns to London to investigate, only to discover that someone is determined to thwart him by any means, and he fears he has very little time to identify the culprits before he becomes a victim in the battle for the cathedral's future.