Summary
In gas-lit London, a single cerulean garter—once clasped around the powdered thigh of a Stuart countess—vanishes from a hermetically sealed museum alcove under the fog-bloated gaze of Big Ben. The culprit, nicknamed The Hawk, ghosts through cobblestone arteries, leaving behind only the scent of Turkish tobacco and a monogrammed calling card inked with a crimson raptor. Scotland Yard’s hounds, among them Wyndham Standing’s phlegmatic inspector, sprint headlong into the haze, yet the thief’s silhouette keeps slipping through the lattice of shadows like mercury across cracked glass. Enter Warner Richmond’s gentleman-adventurer, Hugh Conway—equal parts boulevardier and bloodhound—who pursues the relic less for duty than for the vertiginous thrill of chasing an enigma. One twist of fate later, a misplaced cufflink, a misread glance, and suddenly the hunter wears the quarry’s face: gossip sheets shriek that Conway is The Hawk incarnate. Now the city’s gas-lamps glare accusation; every monocle reflects his disgrace. Forced into the sewers of social exile, he negotiates the capital’s nocturnal underbelly—music-hall divas, anarchist pamphleteers, diamond-smuggling dowagers—while the genuine larcenist taunts him with perfumed letters and midnight phone calls that ring like funeral bells. At stake: not merely a strip of embroidered silk, but a nation’s amour propre and a man’s last syllable of identity. The climax erupts inside a shuttered Thames dock where moonlight drips through broken skylights onto crates of stolen dynamite; there, identities are doffed like opera cloaks, bullets kiss iron girders, and the garter itself—revealed to be encoded with a clandestine treaty—becomes the Rosetta Stone for a kingdom teetering between Edwardian opulence and Great-War abyss. When the smoke clears, only one heartbeat retains its innocence, and even the river seems to hold its breath.
Synopsis
A thief known as The Hawk has stolen the treasured Garter from the British Museum. One of the men pursuing the thief is mistakenly thought to be The Hawk himself, and so must seek his quarry while himself being hunted.
