The Rival Queens: A Novel of Murder in Eighteenth-Century London - Softcover

Morgan, Fidelis

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0060522062 ISBN 13: 9780060522063

Publisher: Harper Paperbacks, 2003

Synopsis

London 1700. The intrepid and impecunious heroines Countess Ashby de la Zouche and her maidservant, Alpiew, are scavenging for scandal for that scurrilous rag, the London Trumpet. With the bailiffs, as ever, in hot pursuit, the Countess and Alpiew escape to a philosophical lecture at the York Building's concert hall. But their dull evening is confounded when one player staggers onto the stage, hands dripping with blood. A doyenne has been decapitated under their very noses!

The unlikely sleuths find an abundance of suspects: players, fanatics, a Punch-and-Judy man -- not to mention a painter with a silver proboscis. They pursue their quarry from the Tower of London to Bedlam, with a brief detour to the wilds of Wapping, uncovering a shocking web of intrigue and corruption extending to the highest echelons of society and the judiciary.

About this title

About the Author

Fidelis Morgan is an actor and an expert in Restoration comedy. Acclaimed for her stage plays, Pamela and Hangover Square, she also collaborated with Lynda la Plante on England's Channel 4's tense pschological thriller Killer Net. She has written nonfiction studies of charismatic female figures from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and contributed to the bestselling Virago anthology Wicked. In her first novel, Unnatural Fire, she combined historical interest with her life-long passion for crime fiction.

From Publishers Weekly

In her second bawdy, madcap adventure (after 2001's Unnatural Fire), the incomparable Anastasia, Lady Ashby de la Zouche, Countess of Clapham, Baroness Penge (and former mistress to Charles II), aided by her faithful maid, Alpiew, faces "a brace of murders, an illicit marriage ceremony, an escape of a prisoner from the Tower, bribery, corruption at the highest level, a burglary and an abduction." When she doesn't run fast enough, bailiffs temporarily deposit the Countess in a "sponging house" for debtors. At other times such blackguards as Lord Giles Rakewell and his hooligans, the Tityre-tus gang, harass her. Morgan, a British actress and expert on Restoration comedy, brings 1700 London intensely to life, from the filth-ridden Thames to teeming Covent Garden, home to pickpockets, actors and writers. The Countess and Alpiew eke out a livelihood writing gossip for the London Trumpet, as well as planting "puff," or publicity. A lot of the fun derives from walk-ons by real people, such as the actor and playwright Colley Cibber, famous in his day for "improving upon the work of a barbarous Elizabethan third-rater named Shakespeare." Living nearby is an incorrigible old lecher who gives the Countess his memoirs. She figures it may prop a table-surely no one will ever read Samuel Pepys. Restoration England will never be the same after this romp.
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: Harper Paperbacks
• Publication date: 2003
• ISBN 10: 0060522062
• ISBN 13: 9780060522063
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 352