Brighton, 1871: a book by two respectable spinsters claiming to have seen the ghost of the Prince Regent in Brighton Pavilion shocks the town and attracts the attention of spiritualist Arthur Wallace Hope. Young Mina Scarletti, a writer of horror stories and investigator of psychic phenomena, suspects fraud. As the summer heat rises and hearts flutter dangerously, Mina and her associates delve into the mystery and, in doing so, they soon discover that nothing is as it seems.