1858. London is the richest city in the world.
It is also the filthiest. The sewage generated by a population of 3.5 million, which pours freely into the Thames, coupled with the hottest summer on record results in what The Times newspaper calls “The Great Stink”. The stench arising from the river is such that the British Parliament is shut down.
25-year-old US-born Kalla is a runaway slave and the bodyguard of Horace Madgwick, a 62-year-old murderous and hugely powerful Member of Parliament who covertly runs a criminal syndicate that uses the river to smuggle opium. Flo McMorrow is the exclusive prostitute of Edward, Madgwick’s 33-year-old son, also an MP, and the rising star of British politics, as well as his father’s greatest foe. He is so besotted with Flo that he dumps his aristocratic fiancée and proposes to her.
But Kalla and Flo fall in love, and they soon find themselves both at the vortex of an explosive love triangle and unwittingly at the heart of the deadly scandal linking the booming opium trade with “The Great Stink”.