An elderly lady loses her money on an investment, a conjuror is pursued by thugs, a clairvoyant sees a brutal murder in a forest and a glass coffin then whispers the name of the richest man in Europe. These seemingly unconnected events set Sally Lockhart on the trail of an evil far more awful than she could ever imagine - the Hopkinson Self-Regulator - a super-weapon in the hands of a Scandinavian madman Axel Bellmann! Once again Pullman's much-loved and fearless heroine Sally Lockhart embarks on a mission - this time to find out why her elderly client's investment crashed and what links the clairvoyant's murderous vision to the rich industrialist, Bellmann. As Sally closes in on the truth, it becomes devastatingly clear that her life will never be the same again.