The Midnight Queen

London, 1665: the plague is in the streets, the court is at its most dissolute, and a masked woman rules a court of thieves in the ruins. Fleming was a New Brunswick schoolteacher who became one of the first Canadians to live entirely by the pen, selling sensation novels to the New York weeklies at rates that made her rich; the plague London here is lurid, fast and entirely unashamed of itself.