By the spring of 1602 Nick Revill is an old hand in the Chamberlain's Company - or so he thinks. When a boyhood friend, Peter Agate, travels from Somerset to London with high ambitions, like Nick, to try his hand on the stage, Nick is only too pleased to show him the ropes. However, within a few days of his arrival, Agate is discovered stabbed in Nick's cheap lodgings and Nick finds himself suspected of murdering his friend. But this is only the beginning of a sequence of violent deaths, each of them implicating Nick and tightening the hangman's noose around his neck. Nick must discover the real murderer among a cast of suspects before he is committed to trial by a hostile Coroner who doesn't hesitate to show is contempt for the players. The pursuit of the murderer takes Nick Revill through fogbound city streets, the Inns of Court, the inside of a Southwark brothel, one of London's most notoriously corrupt prisons, and ultimately to a chase through the English countryside.