 George is quickly dragged into an ongoing conflict involving the Royal Anti-Society, the Godly Army and the Ladies Union for the Suppression of Carnal Vice.His investigation leads him to a strange neighborhood in London, Wetwick, which is inhabited by denizens who are a hybrid of humans and fish.Another of George's customers are an impatient man who wears blue-glass spectacles and his female companion, who both use a slang which is strange to George as a Victorian Englishman but which modern readers will recognize as twentieth-century American vernacular.