Under Miss Beatrice Lockwood’s plain gray dress, a pistol waits at the ready. For Beatrice is a paid friend on a key objective – and with a key past – and she must be prepared to fight for her life at at any time. Yet she is thrown off guard from the fierce-looking man who joins her in foiling a criminal offense outside a elegant ball – and who then disappears into the shadows, departing only his credit card. Joshua Gage is a cipher in the shadows having a hypnotically calm voice and an ebony-and-steel cane . . about The Secret Woman Joshua, who carries out investigations for the Crown, is definitely equally intrigued. He has a personal interest in Miss Lockwood, a suspected murderer, not forgetting a fraudster with claims of psychical power. The seek out her has drawn him from his mournful impulses to hurl himself in to the sea – and involved his curiosity about the real Beatrice Lockwood, whose spirit, he suspects, is not as delicate as her number. He does understand one thing, though: This flame-haired beauty was present the night Roland Fleming died on the Academy of the Occult. Guilty or not, she actually is his guideline to a path of bloodstream and blackmail, mesmerism and madness – a route that will business lead them in to the clutches of a killer who phone calls himself the Bone tissue Man. . . .