When the talented and spoiled Pamela Blackwood meets the King of railway builders during the railway mania of the 1840s, she almost succumbs to his powerful charm, immediately. But she is also drawn in an entirely different way to her new music master, a gifted pupil of the great Franz Lizst. One man offers her an empire of wealth and power, the other offers the spiritual fulfillment of her deepest talents. But the tutor of her once hated step sister, a poor, modest young man shows her that really, only one solution is possible. He is a young man with a mission: to solve the murder of his former mentor. Their stories unfold against the back drop of the explosive growth of the British Empire, when rich and poor were on the verge of war and the "Iron Beast" was changing everything and giving birth to our own era. The Iron Beast is a portrait of an age and a comment on our own times.