In 1880 London, novelist and social crusader James Rankin, with his assistant, Canadian Dr. Kenneth McCall, wants to write about someone he considers wrongly convicted: Edward Styles, hanged in 1860 as the supposed Haymarket Strangler, who choked then stabbed to death five women in separate incidents, then professed his innocence all the way to the gallows. Rankin posits that Styles would have been acquitted if he'd had the resources to mount a credible defense, and that he was wrongly accused as being easily identifiable solely as a one-armed man--however not *the* one-armed man who committed the crimes. In doing the subsequent research, he talks to Styles' chief accuser, Cora Seth, a singer at bawdy music hall the Judas Hole who claims that the Strangler killed her colleague, Martha Stewart. Rankin comes to believe that the Strangler is Dr. Tennant, who conducted Styles' autopsy; Rankin thinks that Tennant buried the murder knife with Styles, then completely disappeared shortly afterward. His attempts to exhume Styles' body to prove his theory about the knife seem futile because nobody believes his theory. He enters into a dangerous game that might prove fatal to him as he resurrects the Strangler.