A Factory of Cunning

by Philippa Stockley

Hardcover, 2005

Status

Available

Call number

823.92

Genres

Collection

Your library

Publication

Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (2005), Edition: 1, Hardcover, 368 pages

Description

One freezing April morning, two veiled women step off the boat from Holland. They are on the run: a scheming French aristocrat, who goes by her nom de plume of Mrs Fox, and her loyal maidservant. With only a handful of gold and fearing for her life, Mrs Fox sets about establishing herslf with high society. Immoral and beautiful, Mrs Fox has always used men to support and amuse her. Trusting on her wits to keep ahead of the hangman, she manipulates others to survive: gullible Lord Danceacre, sweet Violet Denyss and degenerate predator Earl Much. Yet in the earl, Mrs Fox has met an adversary whose sadistic visciousness is a match for her own attempts to destroy him. Through a dark, quick world of liars and lechers, where infidelity and intellect cross swords with desire and death, Mrs Fox hurtles towards a horrible climax. Here is London, 1784 ...welcome to a factory of cunning.… (more)

Media reviews

Publishers Weekly

It's entertaining and suspenseful, and the most monstrous characters are those who wear the facade of moneyed respectability.

User reviews

LibraryThing member bhowell

This book is pure fun. It is an historical thriller but be prepared for the depravity of Georgian London including its aristocrats. The contrast between the lives of the wealthy and the everyday lives of the poor including the routine use, abuse and neglect of children is starkly portrayed in this

novel. But the essence of the book is an intellectual and psychological battle between a highly clever and ambitious woman and a male British aristocrat who consumes and destroys everyone near him. Who will survive and who are they, really, this mesh of characters linked by history and fate? Very well done by this relatively new British writer. It's not great literature (nor does it pretend to be) and for that reason I have given it only 3 stars but where reader enjoyment is high the author has succeeded. If I might draw a comparison to my reading of The Road by Cormack McCarthy which I did not enjoy one bit though apparently critics think its literature, I know what I would choose. Now I'm looking for her earlier book "The Edge of Pleasure". A Factory of Cunning is out in pb by Harvest and by Abacus but the HC 1st may still be on the remainder table at your local bookstore.

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