This image is the cover for the book Twisted Heart

Twisted Heart

A tale of modern love and “genuinely puzzling historical murder mystery” combine in this “fresh and clever and very funny” novel (The Guardian, UK).

Oxford graduate student Kitt Farr has always been most at home in the Old Bodleian Library, but even she needs a break from her research into Victorian Era violence. Taking a dance class seems like a bit of a stretch—until she meets a cute classmate, mysterious math lecturer Joe Leppard. Then, as Kitt and Joe find a budding romance between them, Kitt finds something sinister in the stacks: an unsolved murder in 1838 with an unsettling connection to the young Charles Dickens.

Half a century before Jack the Ripper, a London prostitute known as The Countess was murdered in a way that eerily mirrors the events in Oliver Twist. Now Kitt and Joe are out to uncover how Dickens became tangled up with this horrendous crime.

“Gowers’s writing is absolutely beautiful.”—The Times, UK

Rebecca Gowers

Rebecca Gowers was born in the west of England and brought up south of the Thames in London. She studied English at Cambridge, did graduate research at Oxford on the literature of Victorian police detectives and has worked as a freelance journalist. Her first book, The Swamp of Death, was shortlisted in 2004 for a CWA Golden Dagger Award for non-fiction. When to Walk, her first novel, was longlisted for the Orange Prize. She lives in Oxford, England.