Victoria, 1869. The ramshackle capital of British Columbia, the last colony in North America. Vastly outnumbered by native Indians , a few thousand British, American, European, and Chinese settlers aspire to the values of the Victorian age. In the forest a mutilated body is discovered: Dr McCrory, an American alienist whose methods include phrenology, Mesmerism, and sexual-mystical magnetation . Chad Hobbes, arrived from England, is the policeman who must solve the crime. Could the murderer be a Tsimshian medicine man, Wiladzap, who is immediately arrested? But everyone who has known McCrory respectable or not has something to hide. This is a detective mystery and more. Victoria's inhabitants find themselves in a Garden of Eden but have to face the savagery which they readily see in the Indians but also exists in themselves. Darwin wrote that the difference between the savage and the civilised person is the difference between a wild and a tame animal. Is this true? Chad faces the question not only in the new territory in which he finds himself, but in himself and in those he comes to love.