Verity Lark Mystery

As the London Daily Gazette’s popular gossip columnist, she is extremely adept at sneaking into houses, assuming disguises and overseeing a vast network of spies to ensure she stays abreast of the beau monde’s comings and goings. If it sometimes seems as though she was hiding behind the settee during a particularly fierce quarrel between a husband and his wife, it’s most likely because she was hiding behind the settee during their fierce quarrel.

Verity Lark—England's most tenacious gossip, the London Daily Gazette's most dogged reporter—relishes a challenge, which is why she refuses Colson Hardwicke's offer of menial employment. If the infuriating scoundrel really needs the sister of a radical reformer to be distracted with girlish chitchat, he can bloody well erupt into giggles!

Bedeviled by Colson Hardwicke’s treatment—summarily dumping her via tersely worded message!—Verity Lark is lying awake in her bed seething over his behavior when she hears a floorboard creak. Immediately alert to the presence of a late-night intruder, she deftly thwarts the attack. Taking her would-be kidnapper captive is easy. Figuring out what he wants with her—well, that part is tricky and she wonders if it could have something to do with one of her many alter egos.

It is hardly surprising Verity Lark can’t sleep at night with all the thoughts darting through her mind: her recent stay in Newgate, her debt to Colson Hardwicke, the horrible abuse suffered by the children at Fortescue’s that her reporting on the orphan asylum several years earlier had failed to uncover. And then of course there are the shooting lessons she has promised to give to the Duchess of Kesgrave. Verity has spent three months cruelly mocking the former spinster for her investigative pretensions, and now she is obligated to teach the woman how to fire a deadly weapon.

If there is one thing Verity Lark finds more unsettling than having to give a shooting lesson to the woman whom she has ridiculed in print for months, it is having to give the lesson on the very same morning her alter ego Mr. Twaddle-Thum publishes an apology for erroneously reporting a key detail of one of her favorite subject’s early murder investigations.