With a beautiful and clever wife, a growing investigative business, and a baby due any day, former Bow Street Runner John Pickett finally has a respectable life far removed from his beginnings as a juvenile pickpocket in the rookeries of St. Giles. Then his father returns from transportation to Botany Bay, and Pickett's hard-won respectability threatens to collapse like a house of cards. When a person from his mother's shadowy past surfaces, followed less than twenty-four hours later by the discovery of "Gentleman" Jack Pickett's body in a back alley in Limehouse, Pickett finds himself juggling the dual obligations of settling his father's tangled affairs, and discovering the identity of the man-or woman-who decided to settle Gentleman Jack permanently.