The year is 1924. The cobblestoned streets of St. James ring with jazz as Britain races forward into an age of peace and prosperity. London's back alleys, however, are filled with broken soldiers and still enshadowed by the lingering horrors of the Great War. Only a few years removed from the trenches of Flanders himself, Lieutenant Eric Peterkin has just been granted membership in the most prestigious soldiers-only club in London: The Britannia. But when a gentleman's wager ends with a member stabbed to death, the victim's last words echo in the Lieutenant’s head: that he would "soon right a great wrong from the past." Eric is certain that one of his fellow members is the murderer: but who? Captain Mortimer Wolfe, the soldier’s soldier thrice escaped from German custody? Second Lieutenant Oliver Saxon, the brilliant codebreaker? Or Captain Edward Aldershott, the steely club president whose Savile Row suits hide a frightening collision of mustard gas scars? Eric's investigation will draw him far from the marbled halls of the Britannia, to the shadowy remains of a dilapidated war hospital and the heroin dens of Limehouse. And as the facade of gentlemenhood cracks, Eric faces a Matryoshka doll of murder, vice, and secrets pointing not only to the officers of his own club but the very investigator assigned by Scotland Yard.

Colonel Russell before the War had four sons; now he has four widowed daughters-in-law, each facing the aftermath in her own iconic way. Then an old friend of the Colonel’s dead sons resurfaces, reawakening tales of wartime espionage—enemy spies preying on the unwitting families at home—and is he really who he says? When the Colonel is thrown bodily through an upstairs window of his London Club, Eric Peterkin is once again called to investigate. Eric Peterkin’s second mystery is about recognising that war impacts more than just the men who there are wheels turning behind the scenes and strings being pulled from afar, and the people we leave behind might ultimately leave us behind. Set in the 1920s and the aftermath of the Great War, the story honours the period by reflecting the changing social mores, the gradual emancipation of women, the questioning of tradition, and the illusion of innocence—the truth behind the facade, against a backdrop of ongoing war trauma.