2nd September 2010

Catalogue > Crime

The Widow's Secret

Brian Thompson

The Widow’s Secret – the first in Brian Thompson’s new series of Victorian detective novels – introduces Bella Wallis, novelist and indomitable heroine.

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.

About the author

Brian Thompson was born in London in 1935. Two award-winning volumes of memoir, Keeping Mum, winner of the Costa Prize for Biography and the PEN/Ackerley Prize, and Clever Girl, longlisted for the Samuel Johnson Prize, were published by Atlantic Books in 2006 and 2007. He lives in Oxford.

Buy from Amazon.co.uk