A FACTORY OF CUNNING

A Dutch philosopher nursing a grudge sends a marquise with a scandalous past to London to work the downfall of an even more depraved earl. Further debauchery ensues—in a guiltily pleasurable slice of fashionable Georgian life.

Stockley stirred a hellish brew of good writing and repellent characters in The Edge of Pleasure (2004). She applies the same technique in this richly intricate revenge tale that uses journal entries and correspondence to document the murders, incest, forgeries, and other criminal activities engendered and plied by “Mrs. Fox,” the missile lobbed by Hubert Van Essel from Amsterdam across the North Sea to Salamander Row, the address of the Earl Much, collector of art and ruiner of women. Van Essel has chosen his weapon of mass destruction with loving care. “Mrs. Fox,” who found it necessary to flee Paris following the stabbing death of her lover and the destruction of two virtuous ladies, enjoyed great success as a madam in Holland thanks to financial assistance from Van Essel, a neighbor who became enamored of her cynical intelligence. But faced with exposure of her capital crimes when a figure from the Parisian past pops up in her bordello, the marquise and her long-suffering but most capable servant Victoire take it on the lam to London with money and a charge from Van Essel to ruin his former friend the earl. Mrs. Fox’s machinations drag in the silly country daughters of a shady clergyman, the heir to a thread fortune, an apparently stupid peer, a moody American painter, and a pretty young dressmaker-prostitute who becomes Galatea to Mrs. Fox’s Pygmalion. Everything comes to a head in a sort of tableau vivant in a cathouse where an innocent virgin is lowered ex macchina before a crowd of rowdies and bidding is opened on her virtue. Corpses begin to drop, secrets begin to be revealed, and justice, after a fashion, is done.

Polished, clever, and really quite shocking.