After profiting from his carbonated-water business, John Rawlings buys a house at Strand-on-the-Green in Chiswick and expects a quieter life beside the Thames. That hope ends when he witnesses the rescue of a small child from the river and hears her insist that she was deliberately pushed into the water.
Soon afterwards, during a theatre visit with his daughter Rose, Rawlings sees a woman suspended dangerously above the audience and senses another apparently inexplicable act of violence. He begins to suspect that the incidents are connected. The investigation moves between riverbank communities, theatres and the social world of Georgian London, returning the series to the city where Rawlings first learned to turn an apothecary’s powers of observation towards crime.
