Some deaths are remembered incorrectly. Others are meant to be forgotten.

Thaddeus Priest has learned that the dead rarely rest quietly when the truth has been buried with them.

Years ago, a young clerk named Artie died during a public spectacle at the Surrey Zoological Gardens. The crowd saw a terrible accident. History recorded little more. But when Thaddeus begins looking into the forgotten death, he finds something far more troubling: threatening letters, old secrets, and evidence that someone who witnessed Artie’s final moments may have known exactly what was going to happen.

The deeper Thaddeus digs, the more the past resists him.

At Raynsford Manor, troubles of another kind await. His father lies wasting in an unnatural sleep, the family fortune is crumbling, and Judith Raynsford is determined that her son assume responsibilities he has spent years avoiding. Meanwhile, another desperate soul is caught in a bargain that should never have been binding—and freeing her may require Thaddeus to confront the power wealthy men wield over those the law was never designed to protect.

In Victorian London, memory is an unreliable witness. Respectability can conceal cruelty. And some crimes survive because everyone finds it more convenient to believe the lie.

For Thaddeus Priest, lifting the veil may be far more dangerous than leaving the dead forgotten.