London, 1792. Fog forever shrouds the Thames, concealing the city's darkest secrets. Edwin Hatfield, a former army surgeon, and Henry West, an Oxford scholar, are two outsiders bound together by fate. A nameless corpse dressed in French silk draws them into a dangerous game.
From a coded tailor's ledger to a locksmith's system of three keys, from secret meetings of exiled nobles to a financial scandal from thirty years ago, they discover that this murder is only the tip of the iceberg. An organization called the Silent Brotherhood has lain low for seven years, and now the turmoil of the French Revolution has roused it. When the "Nightingale," keeper of the keys, draws her last breath on the riverbank, the search for three brass keys becomes the only way to uncover the truth.
This is no ordinary murder case, but a conspiracy spanning the English Channel and stretching across three decades. In a banker's office, amid the shadows of a charity concert, and in the burning ruins of Old Shipyard Street, two unconventional detectives must solve a maze of mysteries before sunset on Thursday and stop a blackmail scheme capable of shaking London's financial world and political order. And the culprit may be wearing a gentleman's white gloves.
