The Midnight Queen

Complete and unabridged, with 55 full-page plates by Edvard Munch, Thomas Gainsborough and Richard Wilson. 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, from Saint John, New Brunswick, 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. Fifty-five plates, from Gerrit Dou to Edvard Munch, gather the candlelit rooms and winter streets that give this plague-year London its claustrophobic, uneasy air.