In Sunderland, England, a city quarantined by the cholera epidemic of 1831, Gustine, a defiant fifteen-year-old beauty, sells her body to feed her only love: a fragile baby boy. When she meets surgeon Henry Chiver, who has recently been implicated in the Burke and Hare killings, in which beggars were murdered so the corpses could be sold for medical research, Gustine begins working for him by securing cadavers for his ill-equipped anatomy school....