In 1885, wealthy New York socialite Beret Osmundsen investigates the brutal murder of her estranged sister Lillie, entering a dangerous world of prostitution where she discovers the truth about the sister she couldn't save, exposing the darkest side of Gilded Age ambition in Denver in the process.

When successful corporate mogul Edward Lewis meets independent and carefree Vivian Ward, their two lives are worlds apart. He teaches her the finer things in life-- she teaches him that love could be the best investment he ever made.

The townsfolk of Old Texas, Alabama, have had enough. Every Saturday night for a year, E. O. Smonk has been destroying property, killing livestock, seducing women, cheating and beating men, all from behind the twin barrels of his Winchester rifle. But capturing old Smonk won't be easy—and putting him on trial could have shocking and disastrous consequences, considering the terrible secret the citizens of Old Texas are hiding.

Sold into prostitution as a child, Angel knows nothing but betrayal. Can her heart ever be mended?

A 1851 Monterey widow working at a brothel investigates when the dead bodies of young women start appearing on the outskirts of town.

In Sunderland, England, a city quarantined by the cholera epidemic of 1831, Gustine, a defiant fifteen-year-old beauty, sells her body to feed her only love: a fragile baby boy. When she meets surgeon Henry Chiver, who has recently been implicated in the Burke and Hare killings, in which beggars were murdered so the corpses could be sold for medical research, Gustine begins working for him by securing cadavers for his ill-equipped anatomy school....

In 1937 China, a mortician arrives at a Catholic church in Nanjing to prepare a priest for burial and finds himself the unwilling protector of a group of convent students and prostitutes from the invading Japanese army.

Sarah Brandt and Sergeant Frank Malloy investigate the murder of a charitable lady of means who rescued a prostitute and her newborn.