An Imperfect Enjoyment

London, 1665

Roundhead's twenty-year-old daughter, Thomazine Babbitt finally gets her fairy tale romance - although her idea of a handsome prince is a little unconventional…

He is the scarred, middle-aged and slightly-broken Admiralty intelligencer and diplomat Major Thankful Russell; her childhood hero. Russell, however, always considered himself more frog than ‘prince charming’…

But as war with the Dutch looms and tensions run high in the streets of London, the passionate republican principles that saw Thomazine first fall in love with her rebel white-knight are suddenly suspicious.

Would a man whose principles led him to once take up arms against his King, turn his coat again and work against His Majesty for the Dutch Republic? Someone wants to make it seem so.

Accused of arson and murder, suspected of treason, dismissed from his post and shunned by polite society, Russell - with a disfigured man's horror of being conspicuous - favours returning to domestic obscurity, but Thomazine is determined to face down their accusers.

In desperation, Thomaszine turns to the Merry Gang, the demimonde ring of fashionable libertines headed up by the cunning John Wilmot, the Earl of Rochester.

Plunged into a dark world of conspiracies, deceit, revenge and kidnap, Thomazine Babbitt will stop at nothing in her quest to claim back her hero’s innocence.