No one else re-creates the gas-lit atmosphere of Victorian London quite like Edgar Award winner Anne Perry. In her Charlotte and Thomas Pitt mysteries, the shrewd inspector and his clever society wife together root out murderers in the most elegant and the most squalid neighborhoods of the city.

The horrifying rape and apparent suicide of Catherine Quixwood, the cultured wife of a merchant banker, falls outside the jurisdiction of Thomas Pitt's Special Branch. But when ugly and pervasive rumors about the victim begin to gain currency, Pitt quietly takes a hand in the investigation, in this 28th mystery in the series, following Dorchester Terrace. Anne Perry transports us to a society in which the victims of the most heinous crimes are too often held up for blame, while powerful men escape behind their privilege—a world in which Thomas and Charlotte's daughter Jemima will soon come of age herself.