A gripping novel of love, murder and espionage. . . A cryptic summons from Lady Marchamont launches a London bookseller on an odessey through the back alleys and secret corridors of seventeenth-century Europe. Bibliophile Isaac Inchbold suddenly finds himself slipping from the surface of 1660s London and into an underworld of spies, smugglers, traitors, alchemists and mad priests. So begins a scholarly game: a game where forces are anonymous, motives inexplicable, but the outcome deadly.