The novel focuses on a witchfinder general type named Physiognomist Cley, who has been sent from "The Well-Built City" to an outlying village to track down a theif, using his mastery of the skill of physiognomy (the now outdated science of tracking peoples attributes and abilities based on lumps and bumps on their skulls). Cley is a pretty awful, unsympathetic character, I haven't disliked a protagonist so much at the begning of a novel since reading S.M. Stirling's The Domination, but as with that book, Cley is meant to be disliked and even hated at first; he's a drug user, a rapist, a bully and pretty much a monster by any normal standard.
His problems begin when he meets a woman who also claims the ability to perform physiognomy just as he loses his own ability to perform his art as well. If I had to find a sub-genre for the novel it gets close to Steampunk in a number of ways, but equally moves towards high fantasy in a number of places.
In the end I found the book to be a good read, but I'm not sure I would continue to explore the followup titles in Ford's Well-Built City Trilogy.
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