When Oscar Wilde chances across the naked corpse of sixteen-year-old Billy Wood, posed by candlelight in a dark attic room, he cannot ignore the brutal murder. With the help of fellow author Arthur Conan Doyle he sets out to solve the crime - but it is Wilde's unparalleled access to all degrees of late-Victorian life, from society drawing rooms and the bohemian demi-monde, to the underclass, that will prove the decisive factor in their investigation of what turns out to be a series of brutal killings.