In an alternate 19th-century Britain where reanimated corpses do the work of the living, medical student John Watson secretly revives his dead friend and names him Friday. Caught using illegal Necroware, he is pressed into service by a Secret Service agent known only as M. His assignment is to reach Kabul and recover Victor Frankenstein's original notes on giving the dead a true soul, held by a Russian corpse engineer named Alexei Karamazov.