Daughters of Night

London, 1782. Caroline Corsham, known as Caro, is waiting anxiously for her husband, a politician, to come home from France. Then she comes upon a well-dressed woman fatally wounded in the bowers of the Vauxhall Pleasure Gardens. Before the woman dies, she whispers that a man knows.

The Bow Street constables move quickly at first. They lose interest the moment they learn the dead woman was a highly paid prostitute. Caro has her own reasons for wanting the killing answered, so she takes up the investigation herself.

She teams up with Peregrine Child, a thieftaker. Their inquiry runs through Covent Garden's brothels and gin-shops, then on to the fine townhouses of Mayfair, and into a Georgian society of pretence and secret lives. Many of the gentlemen who dealt with the victim refuse to discuss it, and Caro's own reputation is put at risk by the questions she asks.

This is historical crime fiction with an amateur detective at its centre. Its mood is tense and suspicious, and the danger grows as the search for the killer moves through the upper ranks of the city.