Queen of Thieves: Book 3
Publication Date: January 14, 2025
Peaky Blinders—but with women! In the thrilling final installment of Beezy Marsh’s riveting crime trilogy about a real-life London gang that began with Queen of Thieves, we go back to crime queen Alice Diamond’s bold beginnings in 1920s Soho.
London, 1922. Orphan girl Alice dreams of more than toiling long hours in Pink’s jam factory. Inspired by stories about the legendary Queen of Thieves, Mary Carr, who terrorized the streets of Victorian London, Alice decides to set up her own gang: the Forty Thieves. She has an accomplice too: sly seamstress Kate Felix from Whitechapel persuades Alice they’d make the perfect team. Before long, the pair are making headlines in the glitzy world of 1920s Soho, known for their daring heists and for the row of heavy diamond rings that Alice uses like brass knuckles in her frequent brawls.
What Alice soon discovers is that a life of crime makes her powerful enemies, including some who are closer to home than they’d like. Alice must sacrifice more than she ever imagined—but the toughest and most beautiful diamonds are formed under pressure.
From squalid slums and the grim confines of Holloway Prison to the glittering nightclubs of London in the roaring twenties, Queen of Diamonds is a fast-paced, gritty story of love, loss, and loyalty to the gang. Women’s fiction with brass knuckles on!
Sometimes, authors will create a series and then go back and write an origin story. That’s the case for the third installment of the Queen of Thieves series.
Author Beezy Marsh uses Queen of Diamonds to take readers back in time to young Alice’s humble beginnings before she founded the Forty Thieves gang. Joining the series for this installment may help give readers a better understanding of Alice’s character.
One of the unusual aspects of the story is a dual timeline focusing on Mary Carr in the late 1800s, alternating with Alice’s story in the 1920s. Both women were skilled thieves with female gangs who targeted London. The author smoothly adds an unexpected connection between the two.
The higher Alice rises in the criminal world, the bigger the target on her back. Not only does she face the danger of being imprisoned, but an internal threat poses a unique challenge.
Queen of Diamonds showcases the depressing conditions that ultimately shape Alice Diamond into the successful crime queen featured in earlier installments.
Beezy Marsh is an international #1 and Sunday Times top-ten bestselling author who believes that ordinary lives are extraordinary. She is also an award-winning journalist who has spent more than 20 years making the headlines in newspapers including The Daily Mail and The Sunday Times. Beezy is married, with two young sons, and lives in Oxfordshire with a never-ending pile of laundry.
