The true story of a Harvard instructor who poisoned his wife with arsenic, covering up the crime with childbirth and her Christian Science beliefs. When suspicions arose, he disappeared and reinvented himself under a new identity. To keep up the pretense, he enrolled in a small southern college, married and eventually was hired to teach at Cornell.

It is a story of how one highly-intelligent man was able to deceive two spouses, countless family members and professional colleagues over a nine-year span and nearly get away with murder. The action takes place in the early part of the 20th century in the German-American community of Chicago, the halls of academia at Cambridge, Ithica and Dallas, the gold mining regions of Mexico, the Senate Reception Room in Washington, D.C., the streets of New York and the Gold Coast of Long Island.

The professor’s life intersects with that of Jack Morgan, the son of one of the world’s most powerful men. Jack, upon the death of his father, Pierpont, is called upon to lead J.P. Morgan & Co. and takes the bold and controversial gamble to financially back England and France in the early days of the Great War, thereby incurring the wrath of many. One morning, while having breakfast with the British Ambassador, he is forced into action.