The Victorian age is often held up as a shining era of British history, a time of wealth and power, of civilisation and philanthropy. It was all of these. Yet it was also a time of cruelty and depravity, where power and wealth were too-often used for ill-purpose and exploitation. It was the time of the 'Defloration Mania', where young girls were bought and sold like the slaves they became. Elizabeth Wilson is an elderly woman who has spent a lifetime of grinding toil and poverty in a workhouse. She fled there as a young girl, pregnant and penniless, to escape her depraved uncle and his powerful friends. However, advancing dementia has caused her to regress inexorably back in her life, to the point where she is once again re-living the hellish memories of her life as an orphaned child. [NP] 'The Eighth Circle of Hell' is a bleak study of the stark contrast between the polite, strictly ordered society of the Victorian age, and the utter depravity and exploitation of the vulnerable it...

Commissioned Investigators Atticus and Lucie Fox are summoned to an estate in remote Northumberland where a series of bizarre, grisly deaths appear to centre on the delusions of a madman who lives alone on the edge of the moors. Close-by are the remains of a long-vanished castle where local legends say King Arthur still lies in an enchanted sleep, waiting to be awoken at a time of great need. The killings have all been committed using Arthurian artefacts and the locals swear that they have seen a ghostly knight in armour roaming the moors. But how can that be? This is 1890 and King Arthur died over thirteen-hundred years before.