When botanist Liv Nash accidentally digs up the body of the recently buried Murray Hawes, Lewis and Hathaway embark upon a seemingly impossible quest. Murray was a man possessed, fixated upon "solving" an impossible riddle by Lewis Carroll. But could his obsession have been dangerous enough to get him killed?

Lewis believes a subversive media blog holds the clues to a violent murder—despite Dr. Hobson’s opinion that the victim’s death was a suicide. Did lonely Miranda Thornton really kill herself when her online dating profile was leaked to TheBarker.biz, or was her death actually part of an intricate revenge plot?

When babysitter Jessica Lake is discovered dead, Lewis and Hathaway are drawn into diverse new worlds beyond their usual Oxford College haunts—squats and swinging suburbia, monkey labs and fetish photography. But which of these new realms led to Jessica’s murder?

When controversial American academic Paul Yelland is invited to speak at Oxford's Department of Criminology, it stirs up latent emotions campus-wide. And when he is found strangled in his room later that night, Lewis and Hathaway have plenty of suspects—but was his murder motivated by politics, ambition, or vengeance?