The Message

Richard Mordan is twenty-three years old, fatherless, and bursting with a righteous fury he doesn't yet know how to direct. When his father dies leaving the family in modest circumstances, Richard abandons the comfortable expectations of his upbringing and heads for London, determined to become a journalist and expose the rot beneath Victorian England's polished surface. But the city he finds is not the theater of reform he'd imagined. It is a place of brutal contrasts, where starving children sleep beneath the windows of men who write checks for charity while denying workers a living wage. As Richard navigates the treacherous waters of Fleet Street and forms unlikely alliances with his sister Lucy and friend Leslie Wheeler, he confronts an uncomfortable truth: that outrage is easy, but changing anything requires compromises his conscience may not survive. This is a novel about the death of innocence and the high cost of convictions in a world designed to defeat them.