Metropolis

The age of cast iron had not yet begun, but by 1868, you could feel a growth spurt of some sort coming on, you could sense it in the wide open sky. Steamships were edging out the tall ships, ripping out the threads of the way things had once been done. You could say the city's extraordinary nature lurked, in those days. It was biding its time, waiting for just the right moment to surge forward and change into something bigger, newer, better.

Arriving in New York in 1868, on the run from a scandal - or perhaps a crime - back in his native Hamburg, our hero, travelling under the name of George Geiermeier, becomes a stable boy, tending circus-owner Barnum's menagerie, until he is framed for an arson attack and finds himself once again is on the run. Falling into the hands of the Whyos, a gang who communicate with each other by means of a complicated system of songs and calls, he is reborn as an Irish labourer and takes a job as a sewer man, unaware of the part in crime the Whyos have in mind for him.

Happy in his new job and falling in love with Beatrice, the young Irish woman the Whyos have selected to teach him Irish English, all seems well, until the gang's leader chooses Beatrice as his First Girl and the criminal plans of the Whyos begin to become clear-Set in a richly realised nineteenth-century New York, a world of crime, corruption, prostitution and disease, Elisabeth Gaffney's debut is a hugely entertaining, irresistibly readable story of love and crime.