Kathy Kolla's first case is one for the books. Something isn't quite right about the death of Meredith Winterbottom, an elderly woman who was living with her two sisters. The sisters - who happen to be the great-granddaughters of Karl Marx - reside in a charming Dickensian section of London called Jerusalem Lane, surrounded by a collection of old books and odd neighbors - mainly refugees who fled war-torn Central Europe during the tumultuous 1930s.
Was the septuagenarian Winterbottom "liquidated" by a property developer hoping to gentrify the area? Or have some of the ghosts of the World War I remained unexercised, leaving neighbors who aren't so neighborly? Would a scholar of Marxiania kill for Meredith's collection of unpublished Marx correspondence? Or did her unhappily married son wish to receive his inheritance sooner rather than later? And what exactly is Brock investigating: Winterbottom's death or Kathy herself?