The 27th novel in Anne Perry's highly acclaimed crime series featuring Inspector Thomas Pitt.

Another fantastic Pitt novel from the master storyteller of the Victorian mystery.

The Prince of Wales has invited four wealthy entrepreneurs and their wives to the palace to discuss an ambitious and lucrative project, the construction of a six-thousand mile railroad that would stretch the length of Africa.  The Prince’s gathering proves disastrous when the mutilated body of a prostitute, hired for a late night frolic, turns up amongst the Queen’s monogrammed bed linen in a cupboard!  Pitt is hastily summoned to resolve this crisis.  Gracie is recruited as a Palace servant, to pick up the gossip behind the scenes.  Together they must solve this murder, to save Pitt’s care

Early one morning Pitt is summoned to Long Spoon Lane where anarchists are plotting to attack.  Bombs explode, destroying the homes of many poor people.  He finds there is more to the terrorism than the destructive gestures of misguided idealists.  The police are running a lucrative protection racket and clues suggest that Inspector Wetron of Bow Street is the mastermind.  He is the shadowy leader of the Inner Circle and is using his influence with the Press to whip up fears of more attacks.  Pitt must team up with his old enemy, Sir Charles Voisey, and with Charlotte and Great Aunt Vespasi

Pitt, now the mainstay of Her Majesty’s Special Branch, is summoned to Connaught Square mansion where the body of a junior diplomat lies huddled in a wheelbarrow.  Nearby stands the tenant of the house, the beautiful and notorious Egyptian woman, Ayesha Zakhari, who falls under the shadow of suspicion.  Pitt’s orders are to protect – at all costs – the good name of the third person in the garden, senior cabinet minister, Saville Ryerson.  Pitt’s journey takes him to Alexandria and back to London, to the slums of Seven Dials, and to a packed court room where shocking secrets are revealed...<

Charles Voisey, of the Inner Circle, plans to run for Parliament against the Liberal candidate, Aubrey Serracold, whose wife attends séances in Southampton Row.  But when the stylish clairvoyant is found brutally murdered the scandal could damage Serracold’s reputation and allow Voisey the chance to sweep to power and corrupt Parliament from within.  Emily, wife of an MP, steps in to help Pitt with his investigations, as Charlotte and the children are away on holiday at the coast, but are they free from danger...?

It is Spring, 1892 and Queen Victoria persists in her life of self-absorbed seclusion.  The grisly killings of Whitechapel prostitutes by Jack the Ripper remain a frightening enigma.  In a packed Old Bailey courtroom, distinguished old soldier John Adinett is sentenced to hang for the inexplicable murder of his friend Martin Fetters.  It should be a time for Pitt to rejoice and bask in the praise of his superiors, but through the machinations of the Inner Circle he is sacked from Bow Street and transferred to Special Branch.  Far from his family and home he is now in the squalid and dangero

For Pitt, the sight of a dead man riding the morning tide of the Thames is unforgettable.  He lies in a battered punt drifting through the morning mist, his arms and legs chained to the sides of the boat, flowers strewn over his body.  Pitt’s search for the victim’s identity leads him into London’s bohemia to the theatre where beautiful Cecily Antrim is outraging society with her bold portrayal of modern woman, and into the studios where masters of light and shadow are experimenting with the fascinating new art of photography.

The freshly dead body sprawled on the doorstep of General Brandon Ballantyne’s home, is an affront to every respectable sensitivity.  The general denies all knowledge of the shabbily dressed victim, but Pitt does not believe him.  In the dead man’s pocket he finds a rare snuff box that up until recently graced the general’s study.  Pitt must tread carefully as it seems that many men, including his own police boss, are deeply involved in a complex web of blackmail, and further deaths may follow...

In affluent Brunswick Gardens the battle over Charles Darwin’s revolutionary theory of evolution intensifies as the respected Reverend Parmenter is boldly challenged by his beautiful assistant, Unity Bellwood, a ‘new woman’, whose feminism and aggressive Darwinism he finds appalling.  When Unity, three months pregnant, tumbles down the staircase to her death, Pitt is certain that one of the three deeply devout men in the house has committed the murder, but which one...