While taking an evening stroll through one of London's most impoverished districts, author Bram Stoker spies a maddeningly familiar figure hurrying through the shadows. Little does he know that, only a few steps away, a vicious killer has claimed his first victim, a local prostitute. The crime spree of the century has begunand the hapless writer is the prime suspect. Now, to clear his name, Stoker must enlist the aid of illustrious friendsincluding Walt Whitman, the wildly popular novelist Sir Thomas Henry Hall Caine, and Lady Jane Wilde, mother of the most notorious literary notable of the dayto hunt down the fiend who is taunting and terrorizing London and calling himself Jack the Ripper.