London, 1678. The blood-drained body of a young boy is discovered in the snow on the bank of the Fleet River. Sir Edmund Bury Godfrey, Justice of the Peace, sets out to investigate this sinister killing with the help of Robert Hooke, Curator of Experiments at the Royal Society, and his assistant Harry Hunt. On Sir Edmund’s orders Hooke and Harry preserve the body as evidence at Gresham College. When a solicitor delivers a coded letter to Hooke, he recognises the code as being one used during the Civil War thirty years before, and discovers that Sir Edmund had in fact used it at that time to assist King Charles II’s escape to France. Hooke becomes suspicious of Sir Edmund and forbids Harry from continuing the investigation. But Harry ignores Hooke’s warnings. Meanwhile, we’re introduced to the Earl of Shaftesbury, his secretary John Locke, and Lefèvre, an assassin. They are plotting against the King and intend to exploit the anti-Catholic feeling in London to cast blame for the plot on innocent Catholics. Shaftesbury’s employees give false evidence to Sir Edmund about the dead boy, and as they intended, rumours start to spread of a Catholic plot and the finding of a ‘devil-boy’ drained of his blood. When another young boy is found dead, Hooke, Harry and Sir Edmund are summoned by the King to examine the body. But before they have time to find the serial killer, another, more high profile, death changes the course of their investigation. As word spreads of Harry’s investigation into the mysterious deaths, he finds his life in grave danger, not knowing any longer who to trust when he finally realises the horrible significance of one man’s research and the terrible consequences of experiments gone wrong in the name of Science.
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