Cirrus@Austlit

'Jonathan Wild knows power like no one else in London. He arrived as a wide-eyed young man in 1703, dazzled by a metropolis brimming with trade, immigration and crime. With a combination of greed, arrogance and ambition, Wild stopped at nothing to secure his place in this great and monstrous London and within a few years, he became the city’s Thief-Taker General, one of the most feared and wealthy officials in town, charged with the capture and arrest of felons for reward. But his power is matched only by the number of enemies he’s made along the way, and his star is burning rather too brightly for the likings of some.

'Daniel Defoe is in trouble. Following a series of failed business ventures, the renowned pamphleteer, fiction writer and political operative is dead broke. With his creditors at his heels, and facing debtors’ prison, Defoe is too crippled with anxiety to write. That is, until he visits Newgate Prison with the intention of chronicling the stories of its inmates, and meets a young man with a deep hatred for Jonathan Wild and a story to tell.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.

'If you let decisions happen to you, rather than making decisions, what will happen to you? Can you become someone else without the world noticing?

'When David's wife confesses that she was once a prostitute, the revelation doesn't disturb him, he considers it simply an error of youth. But the following night David collapses from a rare brain disease and within a few months his world is turned upside down.

'It was a perfectly acceptable life – successful business, happy marriage, two children - why then has David involved himself in an identity-theft crime worth millions of dollars? Why is he taking instructions from the oddly eloquent, handsome criminal, Ben Strbic? David can't quite understand the sequence of events that has led him here, only that he must continue to the very end.

'As the days and months progress, a scam that was meant to be straightforward becomes a perilous mystery unfolding in David's very own life.' (Publication summary)