The Mayfair Correspondence: A Silver Fork Novel
A modern pastiche of the 1820s society novel

About this book:

London, 182–. The silver fork was designed to keep vulgar condiments from delicate fingers—but it offers no protection against the poisoned pen. When an unsigned missive arrives at the Duke of Saint-Cloud's breakfast table, its impeccable handwriting describes a night in Richmond eight years past, a locked escritoire, and papers removed while a duke lay dying. The blackmailer's next chapter will be delivered at Almack's, beneath the watchful fans of the Lady Patronesses. The price of silence: fifty thousand pounds. The alternative: publication by a radical printer who cares nothing for peerages.

Caught in a trap of their own making, the Duke and Duchess of Saint-Cloud perform a lethal pas de deux across the ballrooms and card-rooms of Mayfair. He reads the threat as a game of strategy; she recognizes the hand that sealed the envelope. Between them lies a marriage of glittering surfaces and frozen depths, a fortune built on borrowed time, and a servant who has traded her cap for a voucher to the most exclusive assembly rooms in Europe. Every quadrille, every whispered exchange at the tea-table, every stolen glance across the Ladies' Gallery becomes a move in a contest where exposure means ruin—and the next installment is already waiting in the wings of the King's Theatre.

Written with the glittering wit of Georgette Heyer and the psychological tension of a Gothic thriller, *The Mayfair Correspondence* revives the lost art of the silver fork novel for modern readers. Here is Regency London in all its polished cruelty: the cut of a Stultz coat, the price of a voucher, the weight of a secret carried in a reticule beneath Brussels lace. For anyone who has ever longed to step behind the red ropes of Almack's and watch the quality tear each other apart with nothing but a smile and a well-turned phrase—your invitation has arrived.