At a fashionable performance of The Beggar’s Opera in Drury Lane, John Rawlings watches the leading actor Jasper Harcross collapse and die before the audience. Harcross is notorious for his affairs, and the theatrical company supplies no shortage of rivals, lovers and enemies when Rawlings joins the blind magistrate John Fielding in investigating what happened on stage.
Backstage jealousies and private obsessions draw the enquiry beyond the public glamour of Georgian theatre. Rawlings must distinguish professional rivalry from personal vengeance while moving between performers and the beau monde that patronises them, using his medical knowledge and Fielding’s experience of London crime to expose a murder hidden amid performance, gossip and carefully managed appearances.
