Book
Daughters of Night
First published 2021
London, 1782. Caroline “Caro” Corsham discovers a woman dying in the grounds of Vauxhall Pleasure Gardens and expects the authorities to pursue the killer. Their interest fades when the victim is identified not as the aristocratic lady Caro believed she knew but as a highly paid prostitute. Refusing to let the death disappear into official indifference, Caro employs the disgraced thief-taker Peregrine Child and follows the victim’s hidden connections from Covent Garden and Soho to Mayfair drawing rooms.
The investigation opens onto the sexual economy of Georgian London, where prostitution crossed sharply divided worlds of poverty, entertainment and elite consumption. Pleasure gardens, brothels, artists, patrons and criminal investigators all depend on reputation and unequal access to the law. Caro’s own vulnerability as a respectable married woman gives the mystery a second pressure point: pursuing justice means entering spaces and asking questions that could destroy the social standing on which her independence depends.
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