The first woman in CID was Lilian Wyles, who joined the Met in 1919 and made Chief Inspector before her retirement. Her memoir A Woman at Scotland Yard is hard to get hold of (and upholds the less proud traditions of the Met in its occasional casual racism and misogyny), but is fascinating as a piece of social history.

The hideously mean-spirited quotation from the Ministry of Pensions in chapter four is, I’m sorry to say, real. So was Joel’s hoped-for functional prosthetic hand; you can see the film online.

The graphological quotation in Chapter Two comes from Analysis of Handwriting by HJ Jacoby; regrettably, the whole book is like that.

Thanks time!

I’m deeply grateful to the Metropolitan Police Museum for use of their extensive reference library and all the assistance given by their very helpful staff.

Huge thanks to KJ Charles Chat (now on Discord!) for title brainstorming, and particularly to Metylda who came up with the winner.

As ever Lis Paice and May Peterson gave me early reads, confidence boosts, and invaluable help.

Many thanks to James Egan at Bookfly Design for the lovely cover and to Garrett Leigh at Black Jazz Design for the print layout.

About the Author

KJ CHARLES IS A RECOVERING editor turned full time writer. She lives in London with her husband, two kids, an out-of-control garden, and a cat with murder management issues.

KJ writes mostly historical romance, mostly queer, sometimes with fantasy or horror in there. She is represented by Courtney Miller-Callihan at Handspun Literary.

For all the KJC news and occasional freebies, get my (infrequent) newsletter here or visit kjcharleswriter.com/newsletter to sign up.

Find me on Bluesky @kjcharleswriter.com

Pick up free reads on my website at kjcharleswriter.com

Join my Discord group, KJ Charles Chat, for book nerding, good conversation, sneak peeks, and exclusive treats.

Thank you for reading. If you enjoyed this book, reviews are very welcome.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

All rights reserved. Aside from brief quotations for media coverage and reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced or distributed in any form without the author’s permission. Thank you for supporting authors and a diverse, creative culture by purchasing this book and complying with copyright laws.

Any use of this publication to “train” generative artificial intelligence (AI) technologies to generate text is expressly prohibited. The author reserves all rights to license uses of this work for generative AI training and development of machine learning language models. The author will not license AI companies this right. The author has already had more than 25 novels scraped without payment by AI companies. The author would like AI companies to fuck off.

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PUBLISHED BY KJC BOOKS

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Edited by May Peterson