WASP

For a gentleman seeking more prestigious company amidst the seedy bawdy houses of an eighteenth-century city, the House of Masques provides the perfect no-touch escorts. Girls, highly educated and socially trained, are geisha-like status symbols for politicians, bankers and minor royalty. But these girls are the condemned, the exiled and the abandoned, who are given new identities to service the needs of the House. Among them is the Abbess, the white-haired proprietor, the Fixer, a disgraced surgeon, and Kingfisher, an African tribesman now a slave. Into this world comes Bethany Harris, a disgraced governess who has been rescued from a madhouse and transformed into the Masque, Wasp. She soon discovers that everyone in the House has a past, and personal horrors, coupled with dark ambition, are leading to a crisis that not only threatens to destroy the House of Masques and everyone in it, but reaches to the heart of government and the throne itself.