It is 1891 and London is still reeling from the horror of the unsolved Jack the Ripper murders when Inspector Sholto Lestrade is sent to the Isle of Wight to investigate a strange corpse found walled up in Shanklin Cline. But this is only the start of the nightmare - the first in a series of killings so brutal, so bizarre, and, apparently, so random, that only a warped genius - and a master of disguise - could be responsible. Even when Lestrade pieces together the extraordinary pattern behind the crimes from the anonymous poems sent after each murder, he is no closer to knowing the identity of the mysterious “Agrippa,” the “great, long, red-legg’d scissor-man.” It becomes a very personal battle and Lestrade’s desperate race to avert the next death in the sequence takes him all over the country, from London to the Pennines and back.