Paris, 1900. The Exposition Universelle has transformed the city into a dazzling showcase of the new century?electric lights blaze above crowded boulevards, nations compete for attention beside the Seine, and Paris's first underground railway promises to change forever how quickly people can move through the capital.
But speed has always created opportunities for secrets.
For five years, translator and document specialist Judith Fenwick and Belgian confidence trickster Coralie Vardon have pursued the shadowy information market known as the Midnight Exchange. Now its most dangerous creation has been brought to Paris: the Master Timetable, a cross-index capable of exposing couriers, compromised officials, bribed railway employees, bankers, diplomats, blackmail victims, commercial spies?and enough of the Exchange's hidden machinery to rebuild the entire network.
Governments want it.
Banks want it.
Criminals are prepared to kill for it.
And Gervase Hatherley, the elegant architect of the Exchange, knows that whoever controls the Timetable can turn information into power on a scale neither Judith nor Coralie has encountered before.
Judith's first instinct is to seize it. Coralie understands that no single theft can destroy a network built on copies, aliases and people willing to sell what others desperately need to know.
Then Judith sees the weakness at the center of Hatherley's empire.
A secret is valuable because it is scarce.
Their answer is not another robbery but an audacious confidence operation involving false buyers, newspapers, telegraph offices, railway contacts and simultaneous disclosures across Europe. If they succeed, the most valuable information market on the continent may become worthless overnight.
If they fail, the Exchange will know precisely whom to destroy.
As the hunt moves through the crowds of the Exposition, into the newly opened Paris Métro and finally toward a departing international train at Gare de l'Est, Judith and Coralie must trust each other more completely than ever. Their love is no longer the uncertain affair that began aboard a train five years earlier. They share a home, a bed, enemies and a future neither woman once believed she wanted.
But destroying the Midnight Exchange raises one final question:
When the adventure that brought them together is over, what will make them choose to stay?
The Last Timetable is the fifth novel in The Adventuresses of the Midnight Train, an adult Victorian international adventure series blending historical railway intrigue, mystery, confidence games, sensual sapphic romance and two fiercely independent heroines who refuse to belong to anyone but themselves.