Murder on Millionaires' Row

Rose Gallagher grew up in Five Points and now works as a housemaid in a Fifth Avenue brownstone. She has bigger dreams, but the position is a good one for a girl from her neighbourhood, and she is content with it.

Then her employer, Mr. Thomas Wiltshire, vanishes. Rose is sure he is in trouble. The police see only a rich young man behaving badly and show no interest in looking for him. The friend who reported him missing offers her little help, and Rose grows suspicious of him.

With no one else to turn to, she starts searching for Mr. Wiltshire herself. The hunt carries her between two very different parts of the city: the marble mansions of Fifth Avenue and the squalid streets of Five Points, where she grew up.

The book is a historical mystery with a supernatural strand. A ghostly apparition confronts Rose in the street. From that moment she begins to see that the world she knows holds more than she assumed, and that her own place in it is about to shift.

The amateur sleuth at the centre is a working woman, not a member of the society she investigates. The story moves between wealth and poverty as the case develops.