Where'er she be seen, Death will surely follow...

London, 1800.

Born in the gutter, raised on the banks of the greatest waterway in the world, Sergeant Jack Raven is an officer in the newly formed Thames River Police. And like any good policeman he doesn't believe in ghosts.

But when labourers building the city's great new docks unearth a child's bones and an ancient curse, men start dying.

Raven must solve the case before more lives - and fortunes - are lost. His only allies are the unlikely kind: bare-knuckle fighters and a network of scientifically-minded young women, led by the aristocratic, spirited but married Lady Callista Granville - whose interest in Raven is a secret that could ruin them both.