For fans of Martina Cole and Kimberley Chambers, as well as viewers of Peaky Blinders , this is historical crime fiction at its most compelling. My first read by this author and it won’t be my last. This is historical crime drama at its strongest. A fabulous protagonist in the guise of Diamond Butcher, who reinvents herself as Diamond Dupree, and set in London and Paris in the early twentieth century, covering the period before and after WW1. Diamond Butcher is a beautiful girl and the daughter of Warren Butcher the head of the Wolfe gang who run the streets of Soho. Her mother is Frenchie a woman that her father met whilst in Paris and they fell in love. Diamond also has two brothers Archie and Owen who is a bit simple after an accident at birth.

Although this is set in the past, this book felt quite contemporary to me. It’s honest and believable. There is pain, love and hardship, life laid bare, it’s a real rip roaring piece of historical crime fiction. When Warren is murdered, Victor Diamond’s Uncle worms the way into the family’s life and takes over the family firm and physically abuses Diamond to do his bidding. She fears for her life so much she flees and goes to Paris. But when she gets there the city is not the beautiful one that her mother has portrayed in her stories. It is hard graft, and she meets all sorts of different characters along the way. I really enjoyed this story, plunged into gangland London in the early twentieth century, this was a compelling story. Diamond escapes to Paris and away from the violence and fear of living with Victor. But soon trouble finds her again…oh this book runs and runs. Leaving behind a dead body and forced to return to London, she meets Richard Beaumont, an aristocratic son, damaged by war but sparks fly between them.We follow Diamond Butcher and her family, once high up in the echelons of London gangland crime - now forced under the heel of her Uncle Victor who runs things. Diamond longs to escape and have her revenge on the Wolfe family who had such a feud with her family and killed her father. This felt like a huge family saga, a cross between Peaky Blinders, Eastenders and Downton Abbey! It’s tough and gritty, but very addictive and I stopped reading anything else so I could finish this. In the early years of the last century, a desperate young girl changes her name and flees the confines of her brutal, dominating gangland family in London. Now calling herself 'Diamond Dupree', she goes to Paris to become an artist's model but the world there is different to what she had supposed it would be and she soon falls on hard times. When she manages to escape at the end of the First World War, she leaves behind her a mystery - and a dead man. The oldest and only girl in a family of London thieves, reinvented as Diamond Dupree, the latest Paris ‘it girl’ - the lover of an aristocrat, fearless and beautiful she is so compelling and a great female character. I really loved her, she was the personification of her name.

Briefly, born into the Butcher family who rule the streets around Soho her life is disrupted when her father is killed in a fight with the local Wolfe gang and her family’s lives are brutally changed with the arrival of her uncle. Fleeing to France to find a friend of her mothers she assumes a new identity and becomes a nude model for an artist. This brings her into the seedy world of Paris in the 1920s and her life is not easy. Following a murder she is forced to leave Paris and return to her family in London becoming a feared gangland queen. There she meets again the handsome Earl, Richard Beaumont and ignites a love affair doomed by the differences in class.

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