An ingenious mystery/thriller set in the mid-1800s in London, blending fictional characters and events with real characters, and featuring a detective intent on stopping a ruthless killer who has threatened the life of Queen Victoria.

The year is 1820. Rider Sandman, a hero of Waterloo, returns to London to wed his fiancée. But instead of settling down to fame and glory, he finds himself penniless in a country where high unemployment and social unrest rage, and where men-innocent or guilty-are hanged for the merest of crimes. When he's offered a job as private investigator to re-open the case of a painter due to be hanged for a murder he didn't commit, Sandman readily accepts-as...

2011: When Madeleine loses her job as a lecturer, she decides to leave her riverside flat in cobbled Stew Lane, where history never feels far away and move to Apricot Place. Yet here too, in this quiet Walworth cul-de-sac, she senses the past encroaching: a shifting in the atmosphere, a current of unseen life. 1851: Joseph Benson has been employed by Henry Mayhew to help research his articles on the working classes. A family man with mouths to feed,...

"Maria just gave birth to her first child, a beautiful daughter - but the event is shrouded in sorrow. A month earlier, Maria's husband, Lord Kersey, was killed in a duel under compromising circumstances. Worse, Maria's failure to provide a male heir has stripped her of any hope of an inheritance. Scorned by the ton, one of her few allies is her late husband's steward, Hugh Granger. Hugh is everything her husband was not - warm, charming - and penniless....

Summer, 1840. Edgar Allan Poe sails from Philadelphia to London to meet his friend C. Auguste Dupin, with the hope that the great detective will help him solve a family mystery. For Poe has inherited a mahogany box containing a collection of letters allegedly written by his grandparents, Elizabeth and Henry Arnold. The Arnolds were actors who struggled to make a living on the London stage, but the mysterious letters suggest that the couple has a more...

"Rosalind Thorne may not have a grand fortune of her own, but she possesses virtues almost as prized by the haut ton: discretion, and a web of connections that enable her to discover just about anything about anyone...Mrs. Gerald Douglas, nee Bethany Hodgeson, presents Rosalind with a particularly delicate predicament. A valuable pearl necklace has gone missing, and Bethany's husband believes the thief is Nora, Bethany's disgraced sister...The intrigue...

When his brother Theo returns home from World War II cold and distant, Charlie soon discovers that Theo's heart has been consumed by a war wolf, which lives off of grief, and must get Theo's heart back before it's too late.

"'Private investigators Lily Raynor and Felix Wilbraham tackle a puzzling miscarriage of justice and the curious case of a missing child, in the new, gripping World's End Bureau Victorian mystery. London, August 1881. After a difficult few months, the World's End Investigation Bureau is thriving. Affairs, sex scandals, divorces... Lily Raynor is delighted to have so much work for herself and her capable assistant, Felix Wilbraham, but she can't help...