Rachel Walton is a young American biographer researching the life of Mary Shelley and her iconic novel and creature on the shores of Lake Geneva, Switzerland.
But as she delves into the contents of an ancient document trunk that for generations has remained locked, she is repeatedly confronted by a man of gigantic structure, of uncommon beauty, of intriguing origin. The escalating threads of her investigation unexpectedly exhume aspects of Shelley's creation from the past, hacking and suturing precious memories to the unthinkable, stripping back the unblemished flesh to reveal what lies beneath.
With aspects of Frankenstein torn from the pages of the nineteenth century and rewritten into the twenty-first, Rachel uncovers the truth of the summer of 1816 when Mary Shelley dared to dip her quill into the ink of her darkest waking dream.
And ultimately, if she is to complete the biography, she has no option but to confront the horror of true love.