The Quincunx, by Charles Palliser. Ballantine, 1989.
A young boy tells about a codicil to a will which indicates that a second will may exist with the key to a vast inheritance. By the same author: The Unburied (1999).

Drood, by Dan Simmons. LB, 2009.
Literary rivals Charles Dickens and Wilkie Collins (who narrates) pursue a fiend named Drood through the worst slums of Victorian London. But is Drood real? Or just a product of Collins' opium-addled imagination?

The Crimson Petal & the White, by Michael Faber. Harcourt, 2002.
Set in 1870s London, a calculating young prostitute named Sugar hopes for escape from her situation in the home of dissolute perfume magnate William Rackman, where she becomes governess to William's only child (as well as his mistress).

The Thirteenth Tale, by Diane Setterfield. Atria, 2006.
A a contemporary gothic tale of an aged and reclusive writer named Vita Winter who wishes to reveal the secrets of her tragic past to a young amateur biographer--a past of confused identities, lies, and half-truths.

Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell , by Susanna Clark. Bloomsbury, 2004.
It is 1806 and it's been hundreds of years since practical magic flourished in England, a country now immersed in the Napoleonic Wars. Gilbert Norrell, the only true magician in England, sets out to restore the practice. Still, he is less than pleased when he encounters Jonathan Strange, a natural magician who starts out as Norrell's pupil but quickly becomes his rival.

The Woman in White , by Wilkie Collins. 1859.
A story of thwarted love, a marriage of obligation, claims on inheritance, the victimization of women, and cliff-hanging suspense. The romantic protagonists from this classic novel, Walter Hartwright and Marion Halcombe,reappear in James Wilson's, The Dark Clue (AM, 2001), where they find a the "dark clue" hidden deep within the paintings of J.M.W. Turner, whose life that is shrouded in mystery and steeped in rumor.

Misfortune , by Wesley Stace. LB, 2005.
Recounts the misadventures of a young orphan boy who is rescued from certain death by benefactor who raises him as a girl named Rose in memory of his dead sister. No one is the wiser until adolescence reveals the truth. While greedy relatives descend to claim his/her inheritance as their own, Rose must find where she/he fits in both family and society.

Jack Maggs, by Peter Carey. Knopf, 1998.
Jack Maggs, a convicted thief, risks death by returning to London from Australia, where he has become a respected landowner, to seek out a young man he considers his adoptive son, who he has been secretly supporting financially for years. He is quickly embroiled in various entanglements among a handful of characters--each with their own secrets.

The Dress Lodger, by Sheri Holman. AM, 2000.
Lowly Gustine, who desperately wants her ill child to live to adulthood, works as a prostitute at night, wearing a blue dress her "master" loans her to attract a higher class of client. She is shadowed through the streets by an evil old woman hired by the dress's owner to keep an eye on her. She meets Dr. Henry Chiver, a young physician hoping to specialize in diseases of the heart, but who needs corpses for dissection, an outlawed practice. With a cholera epidemic running rampant, Gustine is able to supply him with plenty of dead bodies.

Mr. Timothy, by Louis Bayard. HC, 2003.
Having been rescued by a repentant Ebenezer Scrooge's generosity, Tim Cratchett has grown into manhood. But now seeking to gain independence from his benefactor, he loses himself in the underworld of 1860s London, where the discovery of two murdered girls prompts him to protect a third would-be victim and follow leads to a dangerous force..

Kept, by D. J. Taylor. Louis Bayard. HC, 2007.
When landowner Henry Ireland dies in questionable circumstances, his young wife sinks into madness...or so its been reported. She is sent to live at desolate Easton Hall, the decaying estate of naturalist James Dixey, where she is cut off from everyone. There are sinister forces at work this web of insanity, greed, robbery and murder, and Scotland Yard Police Captain McTurk is determined to unravel it.

The Forgotten Garden, by Kate Morton. Atria, 2009, 2008.
in 1913, a ship docks in Australia with a 4-year-old stow-away who does not know her name or how she came to be on the boat. All she carries is a small suitcase containing a few clothes and a single book of fairy tales. She is "adopted" by the dockmaster and his wife and raised as their own, until her 21st birthday when they tell her the truth. Now the young woman named Nell sets out on a journey to England to try to find her real identity. But it is not until years later when her granddaughter takes up the search after Nell's death that all the pieces of the tragic puzzle fall into place.