Anton Mercator gives money away.

That is the first strange thing.

He gives one hundred dollars to every worker thrown out by a corporate restructuring in Michigan. Then he arrives in London and performs a more spectacular act of charity: at a glittering Park Lane party hosted by financier Cassian Krane, thirty identical men in evening dress hold the guests at gunpoint and relieve selected millionaires of watches, jewels, and diamonds.

By morning, the proceeds have been distributed to the homeless along the Embankment.

The guns, it turns out, were not loaded.

The shame is very real.

Thomas Renwick of The Gleaner is one of the first journalists to understand that Mercator is not merely a thief, not merely a political crank, and not merely a performer with a taste for theatrical crime. He knows too much. He enters places no one should be able to enter. He marks his victims in advance. And every person he compels to give has something to hide.

A financier who stripped pension funds. A collector who hoards beauty while hospitals close. A baron with diamonds of uncertain origin. A society that can see poverty from its windows and still call charity optional.

To Scotland Yard, Mercator is a criminal. To the wealthy, he is a nightmare. To the poor, he may be a miracle. To Renwick, drawn deeper into the mystery with each impossible exploit, he becomes something more dangerous than all three: a man whose crimes expose the larger crimes everyone else has agreed not to name.

Elegant, audacious, and morally unsettling, THE SINS OF MERCATOR is a thriller of wealth, justice, spectacle, and revenge — where every locked door opens, every fortune has a history, and every act of charity may arrive either voluntarily or by constraint.