Viper in the Nest
By (Author) Georgina Clarke
Verve Books
Verve Books
22nd July 2025
24th April 2025
United Kingdom
General
Fiction
Crime and mystery: women sleuths
Historical fiction
Historical romance
Paperback
336
Width 129mm, Height 198mm
London, June 1759. When a charmless civil servant takes his own life, few are interested in his death. But Lizzie Hardwicke, who plies her trade in the brothels of London whilst also working as an undercover sleuth for the magistrate, can see no reason why a man who had everything to look forward to would wish to end his life.
Lizzie's search for answers takes her from the smoke-filled rooms of fashionable gambling houses, where politicians mix ambition with pleasure, to the violent streets of Soho, ready to erupt with riots in the sultry summer heat. All the while, she is navigating her complicated feelings for the magistrate's trusted assistant, Will Davenport, and a disturbing situation at home.
Then a gambling house owner is brutally murdered, and Lizzie finds herself tangled in a chaos that she cannot control. The darkest of secrets threatens to turn Davenport against her forever; its exposure will send her to the gallows.
Georgina Clarke has a degree in theology and completed a PhD in history part-time, while working as a parish priest. Her love of the past is at the heart of her fiction: her Lizzie Hardwicke crime series is set in the mid-eig18th century, and her latest novel The Dazzle of the Light unfolds in 1920s London and is inspired by the real-life activities of the women-led Forty Thieves crime syndicate. In 2021, Georgina began working as a tutor at The Queen's Foundation in Birmingham, training clergy. When she's not working, she enjoys dressmaking, running and mooching.