It is 1861 & Albertian Britain is in the grip of conflicting forces. Engineers transform the landscape with bigger faster noisier & dirtier technological wonders; Eugenicists develop specialist animals to provide unpaid labour; Libertines oppose restrictive & unjust laws & flood the country with propaganda demanding a society based on beauty & creativity; while The Rakes push the boundaries of human behaviour to the limits with magic sexuality drugs & anarchy. Returning from his failed expedition to find the source of the Nile explorer linguist scholar & swordsman Sir Richard Francis Burton finds himself sucked into the perilous depths of this moral & ethical vacuum when the Prime Minister Lord Palmerston employs him as ' King's Spy'. His first mission: to investigate the sexual assaults committed by a weird apparition known as Spring Heeled Jack; to find out why chimney sweeps are being kidnapped by half-man half-dog creatures; & to discover the whereabouts of his badly injured former friend John Hanning Speke. Accompanied by the diminutive & pain-loving poet Algernon Swinburne Burton's investigations lead him back to one of the defining events of the age: the brutal assassination of Queen Victoria in 1840; & the terrifying possibility that the world he inhabits shouldn't exist at all.