Rider Sandman, a hero at Waterloo, returns home to a country where corruption and social unrest run rampant, and where "justice" is most often delivered to those whose primary crime is poverty at the end of a hangman's noose. Penniless, Sandman accepts a job investigating the case of a painter due to be hanged for a murder he didn't commit. In a race against the clock, Sandman moves from the hellish bowels of Newgate prison to the perfumed drawing rooms of the aristocracy, and in the process begins to peel back the layers of an utterly corrupt penal system.