Special Branch officer Thomas Pitt, hastening to rendezvous with a secret informant, arrives a second too late, preceded by a knife-wielding assassin. As he pursues the killer and the information he needs to stop a devastating plot against the British government, his clever wife Charlotte heads to Dublin to investigate a case involving Pitt's supervisor, Victor Narraway.

In 1925, the Honourable Daisy Dalrymple Fletcher, her husband, Alec Fletcher (a Scotland Yard Detective) and their new twin infant children inherit and move to a new, larger house on the outskirts of London proper, in a stage of slight disrepair (thanks to an aged, now deceased, uncle). Set in a small circle of houses and a communal garden, it seems a near idyllic setting. That is until a dead body turns up half-hidden under the bushes of the communal...

-- Includes a preview of Anne Perry’s next Charlotte and Thomas Pitt novel, -- — -- —Wichita Falls --   “Bestselling author Perry continues her Charlotte and Thomas Pitt series with another splendid success. She is so familiar with life at this time that history, attitudes and culture are slipped in seamlessly so the reader sees the world as Victorians did. Not only are Inspector Pitt and his wife fully realized, their circle of friends...

It is not the custom for the commander of Special Branch to receive a royal summons-so Thomas Pitt knows it must be for a matter of the gravest importance. The body of Sir John Halberd, the Queen's confidant, has been found in the shallow water of the Serpentine in Hyde Park, bearing the evidence of a fatal blow to the head. At Her Majesty's request, Sir John had been surreptitiously investigating Alan Kendrick, a horse-racing enthusiast who seems...