London, October 1752. In the greatest city on Earth a campaign of terror has begun.
From a cell in the depths of Newgate Prison a woman writes a coded warning to her friend: “Jupiter has begun to kill in a way we have never seen before. It will not stop with the Lord Mayor and it will not stop with me. You are in great danger, Alice.”
For ten years Alice Taylor has served Jupiter with unquestioning obedience, crushing her master’s rivals underfoot. Killing the city’s most powerful politicians is just another set of orders.
As she sets about her work the capital slides into chaos, and as the threat of the mob looms, the government deploys soldiers onto the streets. Now, though, Alice has uncovered a plot, one that may end with her neck breaking in the hangman’s noose. Jupiter will betray her. But how can she escape? Watched from the shadows, followed by Jupiter’s agents, she has no choice but to obey. She has never known love, never known parents. Service to Jupiter is all she knows, and as disorder rises and the net tightens she begins to succumb to her deepest fears. To survive she must summon strength unknown even to her. But can she outwit her master, the most dangerous criminal mind London has ever known?
FROM THE AUTHOR:
“In the eighteenth century London became the largest, wealthiest and most diverse human settlement on the planet. The Nightingale Cipher is set in this city of glittering drawing rooms and fetid alleys, where the rich, the poor and the in-between rubbed shoulders, and where rumour, reaction and mutual resentment could ignite the tensions between them. It was a social tinderbox, and it’s here that Alice Taylor, a life-long outsider, finds herself at the centre of a growing storm which threatens to bring the capital to its knees.”
From a cell in the depths of Newgate Prison a woman writes a coded warning to her friend: “Jupiter has begun to kill in a way we have never seen before. It will not stop with the Lord Mayor and it will not stop with me. You are in great danger, Alice.”
For ten years Alice Taylor has served Jupiter with unquestioning obedience, crushing her master’s rivals underfoot. Killing the city’s most powerful politicians is just another set of orders.
As she sets about her work the capital slides into chaos, and as the threat of the mob looms, the government deploys soldiers onto the streets. Now, though, Alice has uncovered a plot, one that may end with her neck breaking in the hangman’s noose. Jupiter will betray her. But how can she escape? Watched from the shadows, followed by Jupiter’s agents, she has no choice but to obey. She has never known love, never known parents. Service to Jupiter is all she knows, and as disorder rises and the net tightens she begins to succumb to her deepest fears. To survive she must summon strength unknown even to her. But can she outwit her master, the most dangerous criminal mind London has ever known?
FROM THE AUTHOR:
“In the eighteenth century London became the largest, wealthiest and most diverse human settlement on the planet. The Nightingale Cipher is set in this city of glittering drawing rooms and fetid alleys, where the rich, the poor and the in-between rubbed shoulders, and where rumour, reaction and mutual resentment could ignite the tensions between them. It was a social tinderbox, and it’s here that Alice Taylor, a life-long outsider, finds herself at the centre of a growing storm which threatens to bring the capital to its knees.”
http://www.amazon.co.uk/The-Nightinga...