London, 1875. At Lady Cornford''s famous soiree (sugared almonds and tittle-tattle) everyone is gossiping about Henry Ellis Margam''s latest hit, The Widow''s Secret. Only a few people know that one of Lady C''s guests, the enigmatic Bella Wallis, is in fact the bestselling novelist. Bella punishes evil-doers by exposing them as thinly-disguised characters in the books she writes under her male pseudonym. Armed with her pen, the handsome Miss Wallis surrounds herself with useful men: the dashing Philip Westland, possibly a government spy; Captain Quigley, Bella''s fixer, and his shady assistant, Murch, who can always crack a bone or two when someone needs persuading.
Westland comes to Bella with a problem: his best friend Kennett is smitten by the heiress Miss Mary Skillane. But Mary''s father, Sir William is ''an old fraud with a beautiful daughter'' and she has been promised to Robert Judd, a vulgar treasure seeker. Mary is due to inherit the Skillane pearls, currently residing in a red lacquer box in a Cornish bank vault. But the pearls it seems were ill-gotten, and as Bella and her band uncover more of the strange business, a new Henry Ellis Margam novel looks set to be written, if Bella can first side-step her own affairs of the heart, and evade a brutal threat to her life...