The Cunning House — Richard Marggraf Turley

London, 1810. A raid on a notorious tavern sees the city gripped with hatred of gays, coupled with suspicion of their political sympathies. A few miles away in St James's Palace, the Duke of Cumberland's valet suffers a violent death, which the authorities are anxious to see only as suicide. Caught between these two historical events, the fictional lawyer Wyre is reluctantly drawn into a network of dark alliances that appear to link the raid on the White Swan Tavern, the death at the Palace, and the war against France. Leading to a shocking revelation, the novel explores a labyrinthine city of asylums, brothels, and secret spaces, in which poets rub shoulders with pimps, and where the only constant is illicit desire. "Turley makes his fiction debut with a superior whodunit inspired by a major sex scandal of the Regency era. . . Combines a gritty look at the times with a carefully constructed murder mystery that resolves itself in a way that may even surprise genre vet--Publishers Weekly