A Factory of Cunning - Hardcover

If you like your women as cruel as they are beautiful, you may fall hard for Philippa Stockley's darkly witty novel, A Factory of Cunning, which follows an exiled French aristocrat as she pimps and swindles her way through London in the summer of 1784. Having been routed from Paris by a mob (for her involvement in a scandal), our resourceful heroine set herself up as a brothel keeper in Amsterdam, hiding behind her faithful but almost equally heartless servant Victoire. When the marquise's past misdeeds pursue her in the form of an assassin, she and Victoire flee for the English capital, where she assumes the name "Mrs. Fox" for reasons too ribald to reveal here. In journal entries and letters--especially to her Dutch admirer and protector Hubert van Essel, who enlists her in a long-simmering revenge against a former friend--"Mrs. Fox" describes the havoc she wreaks before stepping daintily out of danger, lifting her skirts to show her pretty ankles. In the spirit of Les Liaisons Dangeureuses, though composed in a higher key, A Factory of Cunning is the very definition of a guilty pleasure. --Regina Marler

Published in hardcover by Harcourt, 2005, 0-15-101172-9