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t's nearly two years since her father's death and Ursula Marlow is embroiled in personal and professional struggles. Her relationship with Lord Wrotham has cooled since she rejected his marriage proposal and she continues to fly in the face of society's conventions as to the appropriate role of a woman in Edwardian England. Now she is besieged on all fronts as she struggles to succeed as an independent businesswoman, despite financial difficulties, labor unrest and arson attacks on her mills and factories.

While on a business trip to Egypt, Ursula witnesses a friend's murder in Cairo's Khan el-Khalili bazaar, and embarks on her own investigation, convinced the Egyptian police and Scotland Yard are mistaken in assuming the death was politically motivated.

Days later a young woman dies in a fire in one of Ursula's factories in England and Ursula returns to discover the woman was already dead before the fire started. Driven by her need for justice and the dictates of her conscience, Ursula must rely on her own powers of detection and a growing interest in cryptography to discover a possible connection between the deaths, the return of her Bolshevik ex-lover and disturbing events in the Middle East.