George W. M. Reynolds was writing London's darkest secrets a decade before Dickens gave us Oliver Twist. This is the city's underbelly laid bare: a world of grave robbers, denizens of vice, and desperate souls trapped in the squeeze of poverty and moral decay. Richard Markham pursues Anthony Tidkins, the infamous Resurrection Man, with neither weapon nor fear, chasing him into Rats' Castle, a labyrinthine den of thieves and fallen women in the rookeries of St. Giles's. There, amid the grotesque assembly of society's outcasts, Markham witnesses the human wreckage of a city that pretends not to see its own darkness. Volume Two continues this fevered descent into Victorian London's criminal underworld, where duty and corruption collide on fog-shrouded streets. For readers who want to feel the pulse of a city both foreign and startlingly familiar, where the pursuit of justice might be just another form of survival.
