As Kate Hamilton and her new husband DI Tom Mallory honeymoon in Devon, a local history museum asks them to trace the provenance of a blood-stained dress said to belong to a Victorian lacemaker accused of murder. If genuine, the dress and its puzzling connections to a nineteenth-century Romani family who camped on Dartmoor will be the centerpiece of a new historic crimes exhibit-exactly Kate's kind of mystery. But matters turn deadly when a shot is fired during a fundraising gala, injuring the man who donated the dress. The injured donor, Gideon Littlejohn, is a cyber-security expert who lives and dresses as a Victorian gentleman, but everyone believes the real target of the attack to be another attendee-a controversial politician intent on rooting out local corruption. This belief is overturned when Gideon is found dead in a pool of blood. But then the politician receives a death threat. Who was the real target? Who would want to kill both a man with an obsession for history and a tough-on-crime politician? When asked to assist in the investigation, Kate races to discover the truth as it becomes clear the killer isn't going to come quietly.