The Devil's Banquet

London, 1933. Cockney private eye George Harley is back in business in Soho, four years after he put the child-killer known as the Nursery Butcher behind bars. He has opened a new detective agency, and he has a new assistant, Bunty, at his side. Their first job sounds simple enough: track down a young girl who has run away from home to join a cabaret troupe run by the notorious Ilse Blau, the so-called Queen of Depravity.

Nothing in Harley's twilit corner of the city stays simple for long. The search pulls him into another very dark affair, one that sets London's decadent, thrill-hungry upper classes against the West End mobsters and wide-boys who are always looking for easy money. He works his way through grimy alleys and seedy nightclubs, determined to get his answers however unwelcome they prove.

The answers keep slipping away. Harley finds himself caught in the mind games of a cunning femme fatale and pitted against brutal Glaswegian gangsters, well-connected occultists and undercover SS agents. The Devil's Banquet is the second book in the Piccadilly Noir series, a dark historical thriller that should appeal to readers of Dominic Nolan and Laura Shepherd Robinson.