London, 1857 – About to hang for a killing he didn’t do, a young Indian, Hyder Khan, is bitter with regret. He’s never faced the ghosts of a troubled past, lived a second-class life in a white empire. Then comes an extraordinary offer from a man he hates, another chance at life. When he joins forces with London's first 'intelligencer – the free-loving atheist Adelaide Doyle – he faces his demons with a courage he never knew he had. His journey is ours too, into the labyrinth of Victorian Empire.
When Hyder Khan is sent to Canada in 1862 to investigate an extraordinary weather event, he can find no natural explanation. Then he meets Motsaré, a Chipewyan woman fighting to protect the remnants of her tribe from a mysterious plague. She tells Khan of a lightning ball brighter than day that made bones visible through living flesh.
With the help of the intelligencer Eleanor Doyle, Khan pieces together the exploits of some remarkable characters. The Rev. Richard Todhunter is a Cambridge mathematician descending into madness. His theories of spinning tops and boomerangs are so eccentric no one will publish them. The clockmaker turned pneumatic-railway inventor John Ashwell is reckoned a better engineer than Brunel. But he's also a ruthless tyrant embittered by a penniless youth. Zora Moon, the millionairess and southern belle is buying arms for the Confederacy with tobacco bonds. She's determined to save her father's bank. Their stories all lead to an elusive French alchemist, Jacques Fouché, who claims he’s found the primal force of the universe and elixir of life.
As the action moves from London to Canada to New York to Richmond Virginia, Khan is consumed by a dilemma: how to weigh a just cause against an ocean of human suffering. None of it makes sense to us unless Fouché has built a uranium bomb physics couldn't make for another eighty-four years.
A nuclear weapon in the 1860s? You decide.
Are you an intelligencer?