In 1593, English playwright Christopher Marlowe undertook his final spy mission, and was killed under suspicious circumstances. In present-day New York, Renaissance scholar-turned-P.I. Kate Morgan is called in to investigate the attempted theft of a 16th-century cipher. She is also asked to probe an $11 million transaction between an Iranian agent and a mysterious art collector: is it black market antiquities or something more sinister? As she closes in on the truth, Kate herself is caught in a web of treachery, not unlike that which ensnared Marlowe over 400 years before...