James Asher finds himself once more in alliance with vampire Don Simon Ysidro, as their investigations takes them to far-off Peking . .

It's October of 1912. The world is on the brink of war. James Asher, his wife Lydia, and the old occultist and vampire-hunter Dr Solomon Karlebach have journeyed to the new-born Republic of China to investigate the rumour that the mindless Undead - the Others that even the vampires fear - have begun to multiply in the caverns of the hills west of Peking.

Asher finds himself with his old vampire partner, Don Simon Ysidro, in this sinister hunt, and is forced into a delicate balance of alliances and enmities: between Ysidro and the implacable vampire-killer Karlebach; between dangers from his past as a spy and entanglement in an inexplicable murder-case; and between Chinese criminal gangs and the walking dead whose blood infects the living on contact. And somewhere in the city's cold gray labyrinth lurk the Peking vampires, whom some say have become gods and whom others call the Magistrates of Hell: ancient, alien to Western thought, and with an agenda of their own . . .