When British Library curator Eleanor Parrish discovers a seventeenth-century cipher hidden in the margins of a rare folio, she unwittingly opens a door to a secret that has lain buried for three hundred and fifty years. With the help of a brilliant but unreliable historian, she decodes a poem that leads her through London's hidden layers — from Wren's churches to the sewers beneath the River Fleet, from the Guildhall crypt to a vault beneath the Bank of England. The trail reveals a Royalist trust fund containing fourteen million pounds, a charity that has never received a penny, and a wealthy collector who will stop at nothing to keep the secret buried. Part literary mystery, part love letter to London, The Last Verse is a novel about the stories we inherit, the secrets we keep, and the city that remembers them all.