Fresh from completing his apprenticeship, apothecary John Rawlings celebrates at Vauxhall Pleasure Gardens only to stumble over the body of a murdered young woman. Taken before the Bow Street magistrate John Fielding as a possible suspect, Rawlings clears himself and so impresses the celebrated blind justice with his memory and powers of observation that Fielding asks him to help uncover the killer.
The investigation carries Rawlings from pleasure gardens and gaming houses into fashionable Georgian homes, where the victim’s private history proves more complicated than her anonymous death suggests. Working with Fielding and the developing machinery of Bow Street justice, Rawlings learns how readily reputation can conceal exploitation, jealousy and violence in a city where rank determines who is believed and whose secrets are protected.
