The Agony Column

London, 1913. The city swelters under a summer heat wave, and American expatriate Geoffrey West passes his mornings lingering over strawberries and strong tea, scanning the personal ads in the Daily Mail. The Agony Column is a battlefield of human longing: desperate pleas, secret assignations, cryptic codes. Then he sees her across the hotel dining room, a mysterious young woman whose beauty interrupts his routine with startling force. When she begins placing her own enigmatic notices, West is drawn into a dangerous game of romance and deception. A murder investigation unfolds through the column's tangled web of messages, revealing that the boundary between love and obsession, loyalty and betrayal, wears a thin disguise. The clues hide in plain sight, scattered among advertisements for lost dogs and missing persons. Biggers crafts a glittering Edwardian puzzle where every notice might hold a life, and the reader becomes as addicted to the column as West himself.