March, 1957. A lone policeman trudges through smog-filled streets of London to a scene of a savage domestic homicide. Trying to wrap his head around a series of attacks, in which men senselessly brutalize the women they live with, Detective Inspector Shepard finds himself following a trail of mysterious disappearances, inexplicable suicides, and attacks of panic and hysteria in an effort to find a common denominator among them.

Enlisting the help of a life scientist and a journalist, Shepard reluctantly dogs the bloody trail of the mysterious syndrome right down to a fatal standoff with a hostage taker, in the process coming eye to eye with the most haunting mystery in the history of the Western civilization.