It was the best of times, it was the worst of crimes in this spellbinding Dickensian romp, with the canonical author at Oxford, where the greatest minds of England toil … and one mind toils day and night with thoughts of the perfect murder.

One dank November night, Charles Dickens and Wilkie Collins are called to a part of London notorious for its opium dens-where an Oxford History Don has been found murdered. Eager to escape the drudgery of a London winter, the two amateur detectives willingly accept Inspector Field’s orders to travel on the new railway line to Oxford, where Collins was once a student, to conduct an undercover investigation. Once in Oxford, they enlist the help of Collins’s old schoolmate, Charles Dodgson, a brilliant mind on the verge of becoming the youngest don in Oxford’s history. Together, they encounter a complex conspiracy punctuated by murder, political radicalism, and revenge.