This mystery is set in a Victorian London swathed in smoggy fog with omnibuses pulled by horses, railways clattering by, steamboats on the Thames, smoke filled pubs and posh squares lined with newly built townhouses. The London of an evolving Scotland Yard when ‘case files’ were considered a novel policing technique and women riding bicycles was considered risqué, when men routinely wore top hats and women perched small hats on their heads and wore elaborate dresses with bustles. The heroine is also a novelty a single woman journalist working on Fleet Street for a daily paper. She is struggling to survive after a career setback and is offered a lifeline by a young Scotland Yard inspector who needs her insider knowledge to assist him in solving the scandalous murder of a famous actress, Lizzie Dixie, whom she was friends with. Penny Green agrees to help only if she is re-instated at her old job and she tries to balance her own sorrow with her desire to find justice for her old friend and Annie, her daughter. Penny’s connections in the theater world gain access for her and the inspector to meet with the Drury Lane theater proprietor Sebastian an early supporter of Lizzie and Lizzie’s husband an overbearing successful showman in the style of a P.T. Barnum.
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