A shady and dissolute millionare is murdered aboard a liner bound for Liverpool, his head battered in by blows of the sinister bronze hand, modeled from Rodin's original. Who killed Oily Cox? What part did the bronze hand play in the murder? What was the motive? Such are the questions which Fleming Stone, enlisted as a disguised passenger on shipboard, sets out to answer in his clever, inimitable manner.

Naturally excitement runs high as clue after clue is unearthed and the finger of suspicion points first to one and then another of the various passengers on the steamer. The heroine, an exclusive, self-reliant American girl enveloped in an atmosphere of mystery, is chiefly suspected because of circumstantial evidence.

The story is closely knit together with many surprising and unlooked for denouements which keep the reader's interest at high pitch until the very end when the guilty parties are tracked to their doom.