When chimney sweep Tom Wasp visits his friend Eliza Hogg in Newgate Prison in January 1863, on the day before she is due to be hanged, he is surprised to be given the only thing of value she possesses—and even more surprised when that turns out to be a pawn ticket.
Tom’s apprentice, twelve-year-old Ned, is disappointed that the pawned item was only a scruffy sailor doll. Some days later however, they find its hidden secret…
That secret not only sets the two most notorious gangs of London’s East End, the Rat Mob and the Nichol Gang, at each other’s throats, but brings about a tense international situation at a time when the Prince of Wales is about to marry a Danish princess. When Dinah, the daughter of the leader of the Rat Mob, is found murdered, Tom resolves to find her killer for the sake of his friend, her sister Jemima. Helped by Ned and the self-appointed Bug Destroyer to Her Majesty, the redoubtable Mr Chuckwick, Tom pursues the trail through dangerous waters until he reaches the frightening truth behind two murders and the motives for them.
Related by Tom himself, this second book in the Tom Wasp series is a gripping historical mystery that takes the reader back to the squalor of the nineteenth-century East London docklands, as Tom grapples his way through the fog to the truth.