The setting is London in 1851, the year of the Great Exhibition. Together with a Welsh police inspector the successful Swedish authoress Euthanasia Bondeson goes in search of her beautiful companion, who has disappeared in the narrow streets and alleyways of London. She meets beggars and whores, artists and society beauties, all actors on the modern city's stage in a drama of dark, shadows and ever changing desires. In this world where gender boundaries are constantly shifting, can we even tell who is a man and who is a woman? With skirts flapping Euthanasia forges her way through this romp of a crime novel, surveying the streets which Sherlock Holmes himself will not tread until a whole generation later.