London, 1852. The British Empire is approaching the height of its power. But in the shadows, a new kind of power is being built.
Inspector Charles Frederick Field of the Metropolitan Police is accustomed to London's darker secrets. But when an apparently ordinary crime draws him into a trail of murder, disappearance and conspiracy, he begins to suspect that something far more dangerous lies behind it - something reaching into the highest levels of government.
At his side is an unlikely investigator: Charles Dickens.
The friendship is not entirely fiction. Dickens knew and admired the real Inspector Field, accompanied him on nocturnal police patrols through London, and wrote about those experiences for Household Words. Field would later be widely associated with the inspiration for Inspector Bucket in Bleak House.
Engine of Empire takes that remarkable historical relationship one step further.
What if Dickens did more than observe? What if he sometimes helped Field investigate? And what if some of the people, places and crimes that subsequently appeared in his fiction had their origins in cases the two men encountered together?
Their investigation leads from London's rookeries and theatres to workshops, government offices and the hidden machinery of the Victorian state. Somewhere behind a succession of deaths lies an extraordinary technological secret - a machine whose creators believe it could secure Britain's supremacy for generations.
But a machine capable of serving an empire may also be capable of controlling one.
Blending real people and events with historical speculation, Engine of Empire is a Victorian crime and conspiracy thriller about friendship, technological ambition and the seductive argument that almost anything can be justified in the name of national security.
History tells us that Dickens walked the streets with Inspector Field.
Engine of Empire asks what might have happened next.