Celebrating the 1866 holiday season at the side of his fiancée, amateur sleuth Charles Lenox is drawn into the double-homicide case of two reporters, an investigation that's complicated by a police ruling that the killings are unrelated.
Investigating the murder of a footman whose death is complicated by a false identity and unsettling facts about the victim's employers, Detective Lenox pursues a series of leads only to discover that an old friend may be involved.
When a servant girl is found dead, a supposed suicide, Victorian gentleman and amateur sleuth Charles Lenox is called in by his old friend, Lady Jane, to investigate and begins to suspect that the girl has fallen victim to a rare and deadly poison.