The Dumpling: A Detective Love Story of a Great Labour Rising

Mr. Rissler is a detective with a talent for finding trouble. He finds it immediately in the form of a luminous stranger who sends him flying into a lake during their first encounter, leaving him enchantedly drowned in more ways than one. But before he can pursue this maddening woman, his editor calls with urgent business: infiltrate the Dumpling's opium den, a shadowy operation at the heart of London's criminal underworld. What begins as a straightforward investigation unravels into something far more dangerous, as Rissler discovers the Dumpling's reach extends beyond the city's grimiest opium parlors into the glittering drawing rooms of the powerful. The case demands he navigate a labyrinth of deception, where every ally might be a traitor and every clue a trap. Yet through it all, the memory of that chaotic lake encounter haunts him, and he begins to wonder whether the woman who capsized his life might be connected to the very crime he's been sent to solve. Part romantic comedy, part hard-boiled detective thriller, this 1907 gem captures Edwardian London in all its gritty glamour, where love and danger prove impossible to separate.