Daughters of Night by Laura Shepherd-Robinson review – scandalous liaisons

Laura Shepherd-Robinson seemed to emerge fully formed as a novelist with her award-winning 2019 debut, Blood & Sugar, a sophisticated historical murder mystery set in Georgian London at the heart of the slave trade. Her equally impressive follow-up, Daughters of Night, explores the lucrative and often dangerous demimonde of prostitution. It was estimated that one in five women in late 18th-century London had at some point participated in sex work, and the potential for scandal, blackmail or disgrace reached to the highest ranks of Georgian society.

Mrs Caroline Corsham, wife of Captain Harry Corsham (the protagonist of Blood & Sugar), has a dangerous secret of her own. An Italian countess of her acquaintance offers to help, but on the night of their clandestine meeting in Vauxhall Pleasure Gardens, Caro finds her friend murdered. It doesn’t take long to discover that the dead woman was no countess but a prostitute named Lucy Loveless, a favourite of powerful men. When it appears that the magistrate and the Bow Street runners have more interest in covering up the crime than solving it, Caro hires a private thief-taker, Peregrine Child, to find Lucy’s killer, entangling herself with people who will go to any lengths to protect their secrets.

Shepherd-Robinson’s knowledge of the period is wide-ranging, and her previous career in politics has clearly given her a thorough grounding in intrigue and spin. She weaves in high finance and military history, art and architecture, ladies’ fashions and the workings of the Whores’ Club, without ever slowing down a plot as intricate and precision-engineered as a Janvierclock. But behind the switchback twists is a thoughtful examination of the lives and freedoms of women. “Those women were their own masters,” one society wife says enviously of the prostitutes, though the novel suggests that this is not the whole truth. It’s a rare woman – wife or whore – whose security can’t be snatched away from her by a man’s changing moods.

Daughters of Night is a deeply satisfying novel, reminiscent of Iain Pears’s later work in its feel for historical detail and character, and the way it subtly asks questions about our own age.

• Daughters of Night by Laura Shepherd-Robinson is published by Mantle (£14.99). To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply