A deranged assassin has gunned down fourteen women students in Montreal. Celebrated Actress, Madeleine Blais, is haunted by a sense that somewhere out there, where her filmed image roams so freely, someone is determined to kill her too. Her old friend and lawyer, Pierre Rousseau can do nothing to shift her growing despair. So when on Christmas morning she is found hanging in a barn close to her grandmother's cottage in the small Laurentian town of Ste-Anne, the obvious verdict is that Madeleine's depression has driven her to suicide. Only her grandmother's unshakeable belief in Madeleine's love of life induces the police to launch a murder investigation, in which Pierre, with secrets of his own to hide, takes a leading role.

Paris 1899. Theaters and galleries are vibrant with artistic energy. The new Metro is under construction, and so is the site for the centennial Universal Exhibition. But there is also savage political upheaval. Asylums and jails are overcrowded. The Dreyfus Affair has released a riotous surge of anti-Semitism. Bostonian lawyer James Norton has been sent by his mother to bring back his invalid sister Elie and his younger brother Raf, a journalist., but the brutal deaths of the actress Olympe Fabre, and then of her sister Judith in the asylum of Salpêtrière, draw the siblings into a dark web of violence.

When investigative journalist Isabel Morgan vanishes, her colleagues and lovers see this as just another gambit in her ever dramatic life. But her closest friend, Leo Holland, a Manhattan cartoonist, is filled with a sense of dread: something terrible has happened to Isabel. She is more certain of this than of much else in a life that is teetering close to the edge. In desperation, she flies to London to trace the woman she realizes has become her sustaining force.Convinced that Isabel's disappearance is tied in some way to the genetically modified substances she has been investigating and that her analyst holds the keys to her whereabouts, Leo masquerades as a potential patient. In the process, she discovers more than she set out to know. Danger, in Isabel's secret world, comes in many guises.

In this sequel to the very successful Paris Requiem, Marguerite de Landois again finds herself embroiled in a mystery - this time involving her husband, the Count de Landois. She again calls upon Chief Inspector Durand to help her unravel the mystery. The setting of fin-de-siecle France is fascinating and atmospheric.