Bone

TITLE: Bone

GENRE: Period Thriller / Mystery
SETTING: Victorian London & Coastal England, 1856
TONE: Dark, suspenseful and politically charged

London, 1856. A time of fury and Russian roulette. While cannons thunder in Crimea, unrest simmers in England’s backstreets and factories.

Drummond Bone, a rising misfit in the newly formed - and widely distrusted - Detective Squad, is sent to the flourishing seaside town of Margate when the body of a teenage girl washes up on the beach. The dead girl worked for a powerful friend of the PM. The press are circling. The case needs to disappear - fast. But Bone doesn’t bury things. He digs.

Paired with jaded local cop Foley, Bone steps into the shadows of the Strafford family’s factory, where soldiers’ helmets are stitched together with secrets, superstition, mercury and fear. A second girl is missing. A foreman is poisoned. A lock of hair is hidden in a Russian doll. The workers whisper of a killer in their midst and Bone sees the pattern: decay at the system’s core.

Under pressure from the Commissioner and facing threats from aristocrats with everything to lose, Bone battles rising class tensions, industrial exploitation and corrupt power. The factory’s aloof patriarch Edward Strafford, his ambitious son Percy, and their sadistic partner Lord Hastings all have reason to keep the truth buried - especially with a lucrative government contract hanging in the balance. Vittoria - Edward’s beautiful, inscrutable wife - is more inclined to help, although her loyalties remain unclear.

After a warehouse break-in and a harrowing cliffside chase, Bone smuggles himself aboard a steamship bound for Paris and barely survives being keelhauled. What he uncovers is worse than any rumour: the factory hides a human-trafficking operation. Girls are chloroformed, packed in crates and shipped to brothels like livestock.

In France, Bone crashes a macabre masked auction deep in the countryside - a fever dream of decadence and depravity. When the bidding starts, he lights the place up - literally - torching the house and unleashing chaos. The girls escape. Hastings bleeds. The conspiracy vanishes.

Back in England, Bone’s ordered to stand down. He doesn’t. He digs in. Someone’s still killing, and the trail points to something bigger - a terror plot set to detonate during an imminent state visit.

Two more girls are slaughtered. Then Foley is murdered. And in the glittering maze of the Crystal Palace, Bone races to stop a bombing that could assassinate the Queen and destroy the fragile Franco-British alliance. But the truth cuts deeper than he imagined: Vittoria, not Edward or Percy, is the architect of it all. An anarchist. A murderer. A woman who kills for a cause - and for love. Bone’s last-minute leap spares the crown - but not the cost. Vittoria’s second grenade finishes what she started.

The Commissioner is knighted. Bone is hailed a hero. But the case has left scars no medal can heal. Alone on the Margate pier, he watches a Punch and Judy puppet show collapse into silence. Justice, perhaps. But peace? Still out of reach.