A headless corpse in Huntingdon, the disappearance of a female trial witness, and the apparent suicide of a wealthy railway contractor--if Pyke thought that by leaving the murky world of the Bow Street Runners he could escape the violence of pre-Victorian England, he was very much mistaken. It is 1834, and with the birth of the Industrial Revolution, railway fever sweeps the country. Pyke is uneasy with the luxury his aristocratic marriage has brought him, and when he is asked to unofficially investigate a decapitation in Cambridgeshire, he can not resist the chance to resuscitate the old skills.