It has been three years since that night in the Benns Textiles railway yard when the inspector, Constable Moore, and the Brainers had their final showdown with the Society, and they have been years of watchful peace. The town of Evynsford is once again a sleepy hamlet on the coast of the Irish Sea, only now with a new reverend to assist Vicar Weston, and the city of Preston remains much as it has been throughout the past century. 

Constable Moore, now a sergeant in the newly retitled Lancashire Constable Offices, has kept his beat and his wits about him despite a relative lull in his life of dashing misadventure. However, when a raid turns up information about an assassin for hire who goes by an angelic moniker, Bartholomew Moore knows the time has come. He has a promise to keep to the Society’s former fallen "Seraph"....  

For his part, Aiden Woolbury, the one-time lethal agent of the Society, has not been idle. Fleeing the Benns railway yard wounded in body and broken in spirit, he realized with the Society broken, his dream of reclaiming his title and place in life was gone. Scrambling for purpose in a dark world, he has applied his murderous skills to contract killing, though his aims are far darker and more twisted than mere money....

What follows is a vicious game of cat and mouse with neither side knowing which is which as each man’s will and faith are tested. 

Can Bartholomew Moore bring this man-made monster to heel without becoming one himself? And what dark designs does Mr. Woolbury have in store for the sectarian political community of Preston?