When Flora Maguire is invited to tour St Philomena’s Children’s Hospital in deprived Southwark, she gets a harsh insight into the darker side of Edwardian London. Shocked by the conditions people are living in, she soon uncovers a scandal with a dark heart – children are going missing from the hospital, apparently sold by their own families, and their fate is too awful to imagine. Flora teams up with the matron of the hospital, Alice Finch, to try to get to the bottom of it. Soon Flora is immersed in the seedy underbelly of criminal London, and time is running out to save the children.