A museum in Chicago takes possession of a body remarkably preserved in a peat bog in Germany since the sixteenth century. The body is badly mutilated and the wounds point to careful torture and execution . . . Could the body be Peter Stubbe, the first ever werewolf, executed for black magic and murder? Tom and Kate are drawn to the museum in their desperate hunt to save Tom's family, only to find that Tom himself is being chased and hunted down as the perfect, original synthesis of man and wolf . . . the Wereling.