Prudence Barrymore, a talented nurse who had worked with Florence Nightingale in the Crimea, is found strangled to death in a London hospital. Private inquiry agent William Monk is engaged to investigate this horrific crime. Gradually, Monk assembles the portrait of a remarkable woman. Yet he also discerns the shadow of a tragic evil and a frightening glimmer of his own eclipsed past . . .
There is something particularly unsettling about the body most recently found in Wrightsburg's forest. The murderer left a watch on his victim's wrist with a strange symbol on it--an act that suggests that this is the first of more killings to come. The method is cold and methodical: his victims continue to be found wearing a watch set to a particular time of day. When a copycat killer emerges, the case has become too complicated for the local police department, and former secret service agents Sean King and Michelle Maxwell are called into the investigation.