On Thanksgiving 1849, the richest man in Boston vanishes. A Harvard Medical College janitor finds cut-up pieces of a human body in chemistry professor John Webster's privy vault beneath his laboratory. He is charged with murder despite only circumstantial evidence, and the notorious trial that follows offers a spectacle that is as riveting as the O.J. Simpson trial of the 1990s. A young doctor, James Winchell Stone, who takes down the entire transcript of the trial using an early form of stenography, decides to use his deductive reasoning to solve the mystery of who actually killed Dr. George Parkman. In the process he uncovers a tragic truth involving the Underground Railroad and falls into a forbidden romance. is a thrilling evocation of old-world Boston, and Dale M. Pollock weaves a "whodunit" explanation into the actual court transcript of the case, taken down word-for-word by his ancestor, Dr. James Winchell Stone.