Daughter of the Game

Book excerpt: Set mainly in London just after the Napoleonic Wars, Daughter of the Game is a fast-paced and involving historical thriller. Charles and Melanie Fraser are the perfect aristocratic couple: handsome, wealthy, powerful, accomplished, they are the envy of their friends and the toast of London society. But on a cold November evening in 1819 their six-year-old son Colin is kidnapped from their Berkeley Square home, and their perfect jewel-box of a life is shaken to the core. Catapulted into a desperate race against time to save their child, Charles and Melanie must enter London's gritty underworld, for somewhere in the high-class brothels and disreputable gambling dens lies the key to Colin's release. Caught up in a tangled web of political and sexual intrigue going back many years, the Frasers can be sure of nothing. For no one is quite who they seem to be and deception and betrayal come far more easily than truth and fidelity...