THE MISERIES OF LONDON (Les Misères de Londres): ROCAMBOLE SAGA · BOOK SEVEN· PART II: 22

Night Workers publishes lost popular fiction in fresh, modern English. This book is part of our ongoing series bringing the Rocambole adventures - among the most widely read thrillers of nineteenth-century Europe - to readers who have never had them in English before. The Rocambole saga first appeared as a newspaper serial in Paris in 1857. Its hero - a criminal turned avenger whose schemes were so audacious that his name gave French a word, rocambolesque, for the wildly improbable - kept readers hooked from instalment to instalment, much as audiences today follow a long-running series. These translations are based on the original public-domain serials by Ponson du Terrail. The second volume of The Miseries of London. The kidnapped boy Ralph is dragged deeper into the criminal underworld - a burglary gone bloody, a spell on the prison treadmill of Cold Bath Fields, and a desperate rooftop escape. The Grey Man and his allies press their secret war against Lord Palmure, Mrs Fanoche and the killers of the thieves' quarter, while the letters of a hanged man may hold the key to everything. Our aim throughout is readability. Rather than reproduce the clipped, one-sentence-per-line style of the original serial, Sofia E.V. Hamett has rendered these novels into the natural English of a modern thriller: faithful to the plot, the characters and the events, but written to feel alive to a reader today. Nothing has been abridged. This is the second volume of The Miseries of London; the story continues directly in the next volume.