India Black is the successful madam of the Lotus House in London during the Victorian era. One night a "guest" dies in her establishment and India is swept up in an espionage mission to help recover the document case that was in his possession and is now missing. This is the first book in a ser...
I’d have used it to fillet French. I believe the poncy bastard knew it, too, for he was casting about the room for a means of escape. Now I ask you, after scattering a nest of anarchist vipers and nabbing one of Tsar Alexander’s best agents and finally settling down to a g...
I assume a professorial air and give them a stern lecture on the virtues of thrift and sobriety, warning them of the incessant scrutiny of the local plod and the endless battles with drunken, thieving sluts. Halfway through my performance, I can see the doubt creeping into their eyes and before I...
I yawned my way back to Flora’s room. I was spent from reading the Holy Scriptures to the marchioness during the wee hours, interrogating Cook and Robbie Munro, and narrowly escaping becoming the Prince of Wales’s latest conquest. I needed a tranquil night, which, of course, I was not to have, fo...
No doubt you’ve seen them, those hulking structures of orange-red brick crowned with a variety of fantastical stone ornaments, with a fern in every bay window. This one was just off a leafy green square, down a quiet side street. As it was just rising eleven o’clock on Sunday morning, the pavemen...
The factories were working at full throttle, and the smoke from the tanneries and mills and rendering plants mingled with the vapors rising from the Thames and the soot from thousands of chimneys, creating a poisonous yellow haze that hung in the air like a veil. People scuttled past on the sidew...
While I waited for the young cub to appear, I attended to some household matters, paying the outstanding accounts, prying Mrs. Drinkwater out of bed, and dragging her to the kitchen to feed the girls. Then I unlocked the top right-hand drawer of my desk and took out my Bulldog revolver. I swabbed...