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In late nineteenth-century Boston, home to Herman Melville and Oliver Wendell Holmes, a serial killer preying on children is running loose in the city - a wilderness of ruin caused by the Great Fire of 1872 - in this literary historical crime thriller reminiscent of The Devil in the White City.In the early 1870s, local children begin disappearing from the working-class neighborhoods of Boston. Several return home bloody and bruised after being tortured, while others never come back.With the city on edge, authorities believe the abductions are the handiwork of a psychopath, until they discover that their killer - fourteen-year-old Jesse Pomeroy - is barely older than his victims. The criminal investigation that follows sparks a debate among the world's most revered medical minds, and will have a decades-long impact on the judicial system and medical consciousness.