Victorian Thriller

April 1865. Having been an eyewitness to the assassination of President Lincoln, Matthew Grand, a former captain of the 3rd Cavalry of the Potomac, has come to London on an undercover assignment to hunt down the assassin's coconspirators. Ambitious young journalist Jim Batchelor has been charged with writing a feature article on the visiting American. Both men are distracted from their missions by the discovery of a body in London's Soho district.

On a freezing Christmas Eve in 1879, a forensic psychic reader is summoned from her Baker Street lodgings to the scene of a questionable death. Alexandrina Victoria Pendlebury (named after her godmother, the current queen of England) is adamant that the death in question is a magically compromised murder and not a suicide, as the police had assumed. After the shocking revelation contained by the body in question, Alex must put her personal loss aside to uncover the deeper issues at stake, before more bodies turn up.

Facing court-martial for disobeying orders, Lieutenant Samuel Kingston despairs when avaricious aristocrats imprison his father for a crime born of Samuel’s clash with one of their own as a boy. The young Anglo-Irishman’s only hope of freeing both is accepting a commission assisting William Walker and his filibusters win Nicaragua’s bloody civil war.

Victorian England, 1891. The escape of reading had saved the pathetic life of the orphaned Naomi Gladwyn. However, when she learns of books that are responsible for taking lives, everything she knows changes. Approaching her 18th birthday with only the grim prospect of living out her days in a workhouse, Naomi makes the boldest decision of her life and runs away. With only the whisper of a plan, she soon finds herself swept up into the dark world of The Book Reapers - a secret society that knows there is more to some books than meets the eye.

Pembrokeshire, Wales, 2020. Serious illness has forced Eleanor Wilder to leave her life in London, close her antique shop and return to the family farm in Pembrokeshire. Her instinct is to hide from the world but when her parents bring her to a family reunion at the nearby house, Cliffside, she is transfixed by a set of old family photographs. One of the images is of a woman in theatrical dress, labelled ‘Esme Blood'—a name that is familiar to Eleanor through a set of Victorian tarot cards and diaries that she found through her shop.