Their investigation brings the recently married Drake back into contact with Rose, the girl who broke his heart. And it also introduces Reid to Councilor Jane Cobden, the first woman ever appointed to the LCC – because it appears the kidnappers are a female gang, and radical supporters of Cobden’s aims.

When a lawyer is similarly abducted from his pleasures in one of the Leman Street bedrooms, Long Susan finds herself faced with the gang’s charismatic leader and soon taken by force herself to the gang’s hideout.

As Jackson works furiously to discover their whereabouts, so Susan finds herself growing sympathetic to her captors’ lives and aims – an affection which leads her, for the first time, to question the worth of the working life she has established in Whitechapel.