Unfortunately, the author inadvertently gives the reader almost all the information about this crime she's ever going to get within the first fifty of 356 (a number I checked many, many times) pages.
The evidence suggests that someone is using the children for a dark purpose, but who, and why? How are these events connected to the terrible creatures the Warden witnessed being deployed during the Great War? What does any of this have to do with the creeping hints that the devastating plague he remembers from childhood has not been as thoroughly routed as people believe? The book's culmination forces the Warden to make a terrible choice between an innocent life and the future of Low Town. Gang leaders, dueling fops, the secret service, and wizards are all murkily involved. The Warden is hard and jaded and doesn't care, until he does-a bit. The children of Low Town, a part of the city of Rigus with (presumably) very low property values, are disappearing (and then reappearing, deader).
In an urban, faux-London setting appropriated from Dickens via Pratchett, with extra grit from The Wire sprinkled on top, the Warden, a former street-kid, the semi-ward of a powerful sorcerer, a grunt soldier turned army lieutenant turned police inspector turned special forces agent turned renegade drug dealer and respected criminal force (and publican), uses his lackluster sarcastic quips, street fighting ability, ballistics training, convenient connections with mages, nobles, government employees, and law enforcement personnel, drug dealing skillz, knowledge of many languages, amaaaaazing detecting abilities, cultural awareness and superior tolerance of those different from him, and anachronistic modern worldview to consistently bungle solving a crime.
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