Old New York is burning--. The year is 1864. On muddy battlefields from Virginia to Mississippi, young men are dying under the Confederate and Union banners. And in the streets of New York City, teeming with immigrants and dandies, tycoons and petty criminals, are eight men who are out to strike the South's last, desperate blow against the North. Under the code name Lucifer, they have come to burn New York to the ground. But a young woman in love with a Broadway actor named Booth has caught a glimpse of the conspirators. So have a flamboyant prostitute and a young, hard-drinking newspaperman named Pete Tonneman. Together they will be swept into the treacherous eddies of a conspiracy going terribly, murderously wrong. And to stop the city from becoming an inferno, they must find a killer who is driven by a savage cause of his own....