'ALL MYSTERIES CONSIDERED', read the detective agency's slogan. Clara just assumed the city's merciless criminal syndicates wouldn't be the ones to take them up on it.

Even Greater London, 1887. Electricity beams across the sky, Queen Victoria is shaking off her eleventh assassination (and continuing to rule with a literal iron fist), and, after devouring the lower half of England, the gargantuan capital has no equal. Particularly in the exciting - and surprisingly stable from a career perspective - field of crime.

Unfortunately, a crooked casino boss has just been murdered, and his Lucky Dogs crime syndicate want answers. Even more unfortunately, the people they want the answers from are ex-Scotland-Yard Inspector Archibald Fleet and ex-Yorkshire gentlewoman Clara Entwhistle: London's finest, and only, private detectives. It's an offer the investigators could, in theory, refuse, but sensibly decide not to.

As the signs point to one of the other powerful gangs running the criminal underworld, and pent-up rivalries simmer beneath a fragile peace, Fleet and Clara must race to find out who's holding all the cards - and how, if at all possible, they can rid themselves of the friends they're gaining in all the wrong places.