"It is not the custom for the commander of Special Branch to receive a royal summonsso Thomas Pitt knows it must be for a matter of the gravest importance. The body of Sir John Halberd, the Queens confidant, has been found in the shallow water of the Serpentine in Hyde Park, bearing the evidence of a fatal blow to the head. At Her Majestys request, Sir John had been surreptitiously investigating Alan Kendrick, a horse-racing enthusiast who seems to...

The horrifying rape and apparent suicide of Catherine Quixwood, wife of a wealthy merchant, falls outside the new jurisdiction of Special Branch head Thomas Pitt, but so pervasively offensive are the rumors about the victim that Pitt quietly takes a hand in the investigation. Yet even with the help of his ingenious wife, Charlotte, and his former superior, Victor Narraway, Pitt is stumped. Why did high-minded, cultured Catherine choose not to accompany...

Investigating evidence of a violent struggle at the home of Ministry of Defense member Dudley Kynaston, Pitt and the Special Branch discover the brutally murdered body of a young woman before realizing that Kynaston is not who he appears to be.

Special Branch officer Thomas Pitt, hastening to rendezvous with a secret informant, arrives a second too late, preceded by a knife-wielding assassin. As he pursues the killer and the information he needs to stop a devastating plot against the British government, his clever wife Charlotte heads to Dublin to investigate a case involving Pitt's supervisor, Victor Narraway.

In Victorian London, Supt. Pitt of Scotland Yard investigates the murder of three apparently disparate victims: a band leader, a naval officer and a bus conductor. All three were beheaded. The case leaves him stumped, but fortunately there is his wife.

The dead body of a peer of the realm sitting upright in an empty hansom cab was an odd sight indeed. He had been decently buried once before, Inspector Pitt knew. There was something terribly amiss. Despite a doctor's claims of death by natural causes, Pitt insisted on serious digging to unearth the truth -- even if it killed him.