Published By: HQ
Pages: 384
Released On: 12/02/2026
December, 1765. In the early hours of the morning, Sukey Maynard flees her home – a brothel in Covent Garden. Her maidenhood is about to be auctioned off to the highest bidder, and she is too frightened to stay. But when she is captured and returned to the house of fallen sisters, she has a choice to make – should she stay, or should she run again?
As Sukey accepts her fate, she begins to learn how to navigate this strange new life of hers, and soon realises that there are those who wish her and her sisters harm. But this world that operates in the shadows has its own set of rules, and if Sukey is to survive then she must learn to play the game …
*****
Thanks to NetGalley and HQ for the advanced copy of this title in return for an honest review.
This is another book I had on pre-order but had to cancel due to money issues, so I was excited to receive an early copy.
I do own Louise’s three others books – This Lovely City, Miss Aldridge Regrets, and Harlem After Midnight – but for one reason or another, I am yet to read them, and so I had no real expectations going into this.
It is very honest and raw and brutal. It’s not always an easy book to read, it has a lot of very uncomfortable moments and topics in it, but I think overall she has handled them well.
But overall I wasn’t overly enamoured by the whole book.
There isn’t a huge amount of plot, which isn’t necessarily a negative, as long as there’s something else to keep me interested, good characters or the suchlike, but they didn’t excite me either. Sukey is our main protagonist and she was interesting but I was still after something more, given her difficult background and fierce passion and desire to make something of herself. But she, like the other characters, were a bit too 2D for me to really invest in. There just wasn’t much depth. I can’t say anything specifically bad about the plot or the characters, they just all seemed to plod on without really getting anywhere.
There are a few substories or side-stories as it were, all of which have merit on their own, but they didn’t all feel finished and I don’t like having loose ends. And the ending itself, whilst perfectly fine, it felt perhaps a bit too neat and tidy for the rest of the story.
Louise has done a tremendous job at giving us a sense of space and time and atmosphere. .Everything is dialled up and you can practically see yourself on the page. And I commend her ability to balance the historical elements without being so distracting to the overall story.
Some historical novels can be dry and sluggish, whereas this one was well paced and I did fly through it, even though I wished there was a bit more to get my teeth into.
I do wonder if the problem is with me rather than with the book. I have read countless of historical books about women forced to work in brothels for fear of what would happen to them otherwise. So it’s not necessarily a bad book, but it didn’t give me anything new, it just felt like I was re-reading something I’d read countless of times before.
I am clearly in the minority here because I have found it almost impossible to find a review that wasn’t 4 or 5 stars absolutely raving about it.
Whilst it wasn’t my favourite book, it is clear that Louise has a strong and intelligent voice in historical fiction and I am still interesting in reading her previous books.
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