On a foggy morning in 1602, a boyhood friend of Nick Revill arrives in London. When Peter Agate announces that he wants to try his hand at acting, what can Nick do but offer him a part with his own company, the Chamberlain's Men, who are putting on a private production of Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida for the lawyers of Middle Temple. Yet within days Peter Agate is dead, stabbed to death at Nick's lodgings - the beginning of a sequence of violent deaths, each somehow implicating Nick himself. To avoid the hangman's noose Nick must discover the real murderer among a cast of suspects, including an aristocratic brother and sister, a troublemaker from a rival company and an ex-actor who once saw the Devil himself on stage...