On June 16, 1914, journalist Alec Bannon and his young wife Millie Bloom, a photographer, meet at the Museum of Natural Science of New York an Inuit called Piugaattoq (also known as Minik Wallace) who's father's bones are on display over there.

Minik hires the services of a Chinese tong and a Voodoo priest to assist him for revengefully replacing his father's remains by those of the museum director's deceased father.

The Bannon's, freshly accredited at New York, make a reportage about it and soon afterwards they're entangled into a web of intrigues that surrounds the power struggle for the leadership of the Chinese Tongs that also has far reaching geo-political consequences, involves multi-million dollar transactions between multinational colonial trading companies, weapon trafficking, a mysterious organization of immortals and some (not always nice) supernatural creatures.