Pearce continues to chronicle the unlikely adventures of Sandor Seymour. Seymour, the multilingual Scotland Yard detective introduced in A Dead Man in Trieste (2004) and further established in A Dead Man in Istanbul (2005), is dispatched to Athens in 1913 to investigate the poisoning of a cat. Of course, it is no ordinary cat but rather the exiled sultan of Turkey's cat. To avoid any incident that might incite a war in the fragile Balkans, Seymour must prove that the sultan was not the intended target of an insidious international plot. Given the delicacy of his mission and the precarious nature of the political situation, he must proceed with caution as he peels away embedded layers of domestic deceit and intrigue in the sultan's household.