In 19th-century New York, the public flocked to collections of strange and grotesque oddities called "cabinets of curiosities." Now, in lower Manhattan, a modern apartment tower is slated to rise on the site of one of the old cabinets. But when the excavators break into a basement, they uncover a charnel pit of horror: the remains of 36 people murdered and gruesomely dismembered over 130 years ago by an unknown serial killer.
In the aftermath, museum archaeologist Nora Kelly is visited by an enigmatic, silver-eyed FBI agent who is obsessed with the mystery of the bodies. Together, Special Agent Pendergast and Nora Kelly embark on an investigation that will take them from the gleaming skyscrapers of midtown Manhattan to the crumbling archives of the museum, from a mass grave under a Chinatown brownstone to a house of abominations on Riverside Drive. Their search unearths the faint whisper of a mysterious doctor who once roamed the city...a genius who carried out medical experiments on living human beings.
But just as Nora and Pendergast begin to unravel the clues to the century-old killings, a fresh spree of copy-cat murders and surgical mutilation erupts around them.
