Bella Wallis discovers her plots in the alley ways, drawing rooms and dirty laundry of Victorian London. Under the pen name Henry Ellis Margam she takes revenge upon the scoundrels that litter London Society by destroying them - in print. So when Bella discovers a crested cigar case at the scene of a murdered prostitute she and her friends are determined to solve the mystery and to avenge the wretched girl's death. But the owner of the coat of arms is a dangerous and powerful man, and the world he inhabits far murkier than Bella could ever have imagined. With cruelty and violence threatening to engulf her, she plots one last attempt to expose and denounce the murderer. Bella Wallis, widow and writer, must put pen to paper before her nemesis silences her for ever.

London is alive with gossip about the thrilling new book by sensationalist author Henry Ellis Margam, but only a select group of people know that the real author is beautiful widow, and member of high society, Bella Wallis. One of her confidantes is the dashing Philip Westland, who comes to Bella now with a problem: his best friend Kennet is smitten with the heiress Mary Skillane but Mary's father, Sir William, has promised her to Robert Judd, a vulgar treasure-seeker. Mary is due to inherit the Skillane pearls, which are currently residing in a Cornsih bank vault, but it seems that the pearls were ill-gotten. Can Bella and her friends reunite the young lovers and escape the attention of the villainous Judd?

Bella Wallis’s clandestine career as crime novelist Henry Ellis Margam is proving as successful as ever, but, in this latest nail-biting instalment from Brian Thompson, affairs of the heart are proving far trickier. Bella’s long and half-acknowledged engagement to Westland is beginning to strain as his own shadowy job, working for the government, continually takes him abroad. And then there’s the matter of his sister’s incarceration in a French nunnery about which he refuses to say a word. Bella determines that their future life together can only be resolved by getting to the bottom of Westland’s secret. Her journey takes her from the Oval, and a vicious curse laid on W.G. Grace, to the desolate moors of Yorkshire, on the trail of some decidedly dangerous women and a surprisingly chatty hermit. When—at opposite ends of Europe—Philip is kidnapped, and Bella taken hostage, the old team of Urmiston, Quigley and Murch must pull together to save them—with varying degrees of bad-mouthing and knockabout violence, but never without bright wit and oodles of panache.