London detective Thomas Pitt is investigating the murder of a diplomat that involves a notorious Egyptian woman and her lover, Senior Cabinet Minister, Saville Ryerson, who is negotiating the conflict between Egypt's cotton growers and England's textile industry. Prime Minister Gladstone himself orders that Ryerson be protected from scandal. The investigation takes Pitt from the Egyptian cotton fields to the noxious London slum known as Seven Dials to the madhouse called Bedlam.