London, 1923. The war is over but something darker haunts the champagne terraces of high society. A string of suicides and inexplicable deaths has shaken Britain's elite, each tragedy more baffling than the last. Into this viper's nest steps Mrs. Cora Hartsilver, still reeling from her husband's own mysterious death, now entangled with a figure at the center of the escalating horror. Le Queux constructs a claustrophobic world where every smile conceals a secret and every champagne toast might be a last act. The postwar emptiness has bred something poisonous in these gilded drawing rooms, and Cora must navigate its treacherous currents before she becomes the next name in the newspaper's grim society column. This is Gothic suspense dressed in flapper dresses and fox stoles, a meditation on grief, guilt, and the corruption lurking beneath English respectability.
