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.