It is the third of three novels containing the memoir of the fictional Benjamin Weaver, a retired bare-knuckle boxer, now a "thief-taker" (a cross between a modern private investigator and bounty hunter).

Victimized, along with family and friends, by an elaborate extortion scheme, Weaver is forced to spy and steal for the enigmatic Jerome Cobb.

Under Cobb's direction, Weaver infiltrates the Company and attempts to learn its secrets before the upcoming meeting of the board of directors (called the Court of Proprietors).

Along the way, Weaver meets a colorful assortment of characters, including a betel-nut chewing Company director, an obsessive-compulsive clerk, a bi-sexual bigamist inventor, the London silk-weavers' guild master and several varieties of international spy.

But whoever she really is, she - herself deeply involved in various mysterious affairs - is clearly a more fitting mate than Miriam, who firmly rejected the idea of being married to a thief-taker and sought a socially- prestigious match.

Weaver's unusual profession brings him into contact with a wide cross-section of Georgian era society, from wealthy and powerful East India Company directors to poverty-stricken street urchins.

[2] Liss noted his surprise at discovering how many questionable business practices of present-day Wall Street were already present in early 18th Century London.

[3] One reviewer notes that, as a Jew, the Weaver character "permits Liss to show us how anti-Semitism was expressed in the relatively unfamiliar context of Hanoverian England".