David Threlfall

As we rejoin Sophie Straw, she's finding that fame isn't all it's cracked up to be and she desperately wants to make her own voice heard. But it's not easy as a woman in the 1970s, particularly a beautiful one when the world sees you as little more than a comic muse.

It's the height of the swinging 60s and Barbara Parker has just been crowned Miss Blackpool but there's got to be more to life than being a beauty queen in a seaside town, right? She wants to be someone. The bright lights of London are calling, and our determined hero sets off to find out who that someone is. The London she encounters is not as quite as swinging as the one she'd read about and seen on TV. However, after a series of setbacks, Barbara...

Three years have passed since the Leman Street locomotive disaster, when DI Edmund Reid is forced to return to Whitechapel to help clear his former associate's name. Once again Reid finds himself, along with DS Drake, plunged into a criminal underworld that threatens to overtake London's East End on the eve of Queen Victoria's diamond jubilee celebration.