The young Benedictine monk Alanus von Buchholz sets out in 1543 on behalf of the Inquisition to the thriving trading city of Nuremberg to examine the last great work of Copernicus. Its content is a scandal for the Holy Mother Church: It allegedly claims that the Earth is not at the center of the universe, but rather the Sun, and that the Earth is just one celestial body among many that obediently move around the Sun like slaves. However, upon his arrival in Nuremberg, the printer is dead and the manuscript has vanished. Alanus becomes a suspect in the murder and flees with the beautiful Julia Fugger, scion of the most powerful trading family of the early modern period. The search for the true culprit leads the two into the underground of the city and into the depths of the religious politics of the time. A gripping novel about the power of competing worldviews.