Readers in love with Anne Perry's matchless Victorian mysteries are no strangers to the scandals and secret corruption that sometimes lay concealed behind the elegant facades of the haughty mansions in fin de siècle London. For most Londoners, however, these great houses were inscrutable bastions of privilege and power.All the more shocking then was the freshly dead body sprawled on the Bedford Square doorstep of General Brandon Ballantyne--an affront to every respectable sensibility.The general denies all knowledge of the bloody-knuckled, shabbily dressed victim who has so rudely come to death outside his home. But Superintendent Thomas Pitt of Bow Street Police Station cannot believe him. For in the dead man's pocket he finds a rare snuffbox that recently graced the general's study.
