La librairie des livres interdits

Marc Levy

Description

The forfeit of Charlotte's closely guarded secrets might destroy her

By night, she's a masked chess mistress who challenges and trounces all takers; by day, she's the ethereal white-blonde beauty who volunteers at the children's refuge in Seven Dials — Charlotte Smythe lives a luxurious double life of ease as the mysterious chess genius at Goodrum's House of Pleasure..

After spending years as a gifted investigator extricating others from their peccadillos, Archer Colwyn, dedicated Bow Street runner, has landed in a suds of his own making. The light-hearted journal of sensual exploits he and his school chums kept while students at Cambridge has gone missing, and the secrets within his particular pages, if revealed, could set off deadly consequences.

The loss of Col's damning journal pages is about to turn deadly

The dangerous Captain El Goodrum, proprietress of the most infamous house of pleasure in London, holds the key to their retrieval. In exchange for her cooperation, she demands he fight his way through a gauntlet of secrets to deliver a master criminal to justice. His only path to the damning pages is the inscrutable chess mistress who not only resents his attempts to romance them away, but seems to relish his dread and panic at the prospect of the pages becoming public knowledge.

What Charlotte wants is a puzzle to everyone, including herself. She craves the kind of refuge she provides to the orphans she rescues from London's stews. The respite she seeks away from the world in her St. John's Wood villa with her two roommates is all that keeps her sane, but sometimes, late at night, she needs something more, something even she cannot name.

Will their mutual quest for justice bring them together, or tear them apart?

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