[The Drowned Books 01] • A Broom at the Masthead

London, 1665.

Murder, arson, and rumour - would a man whose principles led him to once take up arms against his King, turn his coat again and work against His Majesty for the Dutch Republic?

Possessed of a most unfeminine strength of purpose, Roundhead's daughter Thomazine Babbitt has finally wed her hero, marred and enigmatic retired Admiralty intelligencer Major Thankful Russell, who's been drifting in and out of her life in various states of idealistic disrepair since she was two and he was twenty-one. Twice her age, disfigured, shy, a long-term bachelor - hopelessly unpromising romantic material, surely? But Thomazine doesn't care. Russell is her rebel angel - he always was, and he always will be. No matter what the neighbours say.

But as war with the Dutch looms and tensions run high in the streets of London, the darkness of Russell's past is all too suddenly exposed - and someone at Court is determined that he shouldn't get his happy ever after.

Funny, sexy, and brutal, this is a story of a man tortured by the demons of his past, eaten up by jealousy and hatred.

It's also a story of an unlikely but happy marriage, the Earl of Rochester's monkey, and amor vincit omnia...