Three years ago, Heather Kennedy left the Metropolitan police under a shadow that has followed her ever since. Now she has been called in to advise on a supposed burglary in the now-defunct British Museum reading room. Kennedy soon establishes that rather than steal anything, someone has broken into the stacks in order to photograph pages from books about Johann Toller, a crazed prophet of 17th century Europe. Toller believed that the end of days was at hand, and he made a number of prophecies relating to the Apocalypse and the events that would precede it. None of them came true.
Until...