Victorian England Mysteries

London, 1861: Ten-year-old Nell belongs to a crew of mudlarks who work a stretch of the Thames along the Ratcliffe Highway. An orphan since her mother died four years past, leaving Nell with only broken dreams and a pair of satin slippers in her possession, she spends her days dredging up coals, copper and pieces of iron spilled by the river barges – searching for treasure in the mud in order to appease her master, Benjamin Murdstone. But one day, Nell discovers a body on the shore. It’s not the first corpse she’s encountered, but by far the strangest.

When Lucien Tremaine rides off to war, it’s with the promise he’ll return to the life he leaves behind … to his loving parents, to his beloved fiancée. It is that promise, that dream of reunion, which brings him back to Tremaine Court, only to be plunged into a living nightmare. Wounded, sick and disillusioned, he flees his family home with only one thought clear in his mind. Revenge. That single thought — and one image, that of the infuriating grey-eyed woman who has witnessed his disgrace, seen him vulnerable, at the very nadir of his existence. Kate Harvey has lived her own ...