Book
The Art of a Lie
First published 2025
London, 1749. Confectioner Hannah Cole is left struggling to keep the Punchbowl and Pineapple open after her husband is murdered in an apparent street robbery. The discovery that he secretly possessed a substantial sum of money offers financial relief but also attracts the attention of magistrate and novelist Henry Fielding, who suspects the fortune may have been obtained illegally. With the help of William Devereux, an enigmatic friend of her husband, Hannah begins investigating the dead man’s concealed life while trying to protect her business and inheritance.
The mystery is set at the moment Henry Fielding was turning Bow Street into a more active centre of criminal investigation and organising the constables later associated with the Bow Street Runners. Against that changing legal landscape, Hannah’s position as a woman in trade makes credit, sexual reputation and property as dangerous as the murder itself. The fashionable novelty of iced cream and the practical economics of a Georgian confectioner give the novel a domestic counterpoint to gambling, fraud and the emerging machinery of metropolitan policing.
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