The title of Alex Hay's stylish and cheeky second novel, The Queen of Fives, refers to Quinn Le Blanc, the latest in a dynasty of London con artists based out of "The Château." In August 1898, Quinn resolves to pose as a debutante and marry Maximilian, the Duke of Kendal, for his fortune. According to the Château's century-old Rulebook, there are five steps to any confidence scheme: the Mark, the Intrusion, the Ballyhoo, the Knot, and the All In. Each step is allotted just one day to accomplish, so reeling in a mark should take less than a week. But Quinn hasn't reckoned with the obstructions she'll encounter in the form of Max's equally shrewd stepmother, Lady Kendal, and sister, Victoria.

At age 35, Victoria, nicknamed "Tor," finds herself in the precarious, although chosen, position of a spinster. She and Max have an arrangement, though. He vowed to also remain unmarried so that she can retain her position at Kendal House (if he married and produced an heir, she would be displaced and lose her promised fortune). Max has more than one reason to stay single, and has always shunned the trappings of royalty, so when Tor hears that he will be accompanying Lady Kendal to an audience in the queen's drawing room, Tor's suspicion is immediately aroused. And when she hears vague words of marriage prospects for Max, she knows something has gone terribly awry.

Meanwhile, Quinn has launched her confidence scheme. She keeps spies and collaborators everywhere, and all it generally takes is a spot of bribery or blackmail to get the information or access she needs. A corrupt archdeacon gains her a place at the audience, where she will adopt the alias "Miss Quinta White." Mrs. Airlie, herself a former confidence woman, will play her cousin and introduce her at court.

With her right-hand man, Mr. Silk, Quinn engineers a dramatic incident on the day of the royal audience: a fellow debutante brandishes a pistol in a would-be assassination attempt only for Quinta to save the day, earning the duke's attention and making it into newspapers. Rumors soon spread about this Miss White. Where did she come from? Who is she to think she can consort with royalty? When the duke announces his engagement to her just three days after their meeting at court, the gossip mill goes into overdrive.

Hay conveys a vivid sense of Victorian high society via the main characters' pastimes--Quinn and Max's trips to the opera and the Summer Exhibition, Tor's obsession with racehorses, Max's botany hobby, Max and Tor's carriage races, Lady Kendal's support of charitable causes--and Max's 30th-birthday ball. The narrative involves various London locales, as the city's boroughs reveal their different personalities and reputations. The action alternates between the shabby dignity of the Château and its maze of surrounding alleys at the edge of East London's Spitalfields and the Kendals' opulent redbrick mansion on Berkeley Square, with occasional scenes set at Buckingham Palace.

Quinn, being a master of disguises, travels easily across all of these settings. In one dazzling sequence, she enters Kendal House dressed as a flower seller and strips off layers of costumes to impersonate, in turn, a maid, an errand boy, and a chimney sweep so that she can pass through the mansion unnoticed to gather intelligence about Lady Kendal and Tor.

Hay makes lighthearted use of period literary allusions. The opening line echoes Jane Eyre: "There was no suggestion that Quinn might be allowed to dress herself" (compare that to Charlotte Brontë's "There was no possibility of taking a walk that day"). Several character names make reference to fabrics: along with Mr. Silk, there are two shadowy figures flitting through, initially known only as "the man in the blue silk waistcoat" and "the woman in the cream silk gown." The latter is reminiscent of the title character in Wilkie Collins's The Woman in White, the quintessential sensation novel.

Meanwhile, the novel's banter and tone also recall the work of Oscar Wilde, with the five days of the action evoking the structure of a five-act play, for Quinn is not the only character who is playing a role here. At the time of their engagement, she and Max agree that theirs will be a marriage of convenience, based on money and appearances rather than true love. "Marriage need not interfere with a gentleman's private pleasures," as their mutual adviser Mr. Willoughby puts it discreetly. The soupçon of sexual secrecy that ensues is tantalizing.

Like Hay's Caledonia Novel Award-winning debut, The Housekeepers, this is a playful romp featuring strong female characters. Readers get the delight of peeking into multiple strata of British society, from the highest echelons down to servants and common criminals. Such stories of historical intrigue build on perennial interest in the royals, as spread by the media then and now. It's a classic literary device to end with a wedding--Shakespeare did so, after all. Nuptials are promised in the prologue, but there are many surprises and double crossings yet to come. This mischievous and theatrical story entertains at the same time as it deals shrewdly with matters of gender, class, and power. --Rebecca Foster

Alex Hay's debut novel, the lighthearted heist story The Housekeepers, was an Indie Next Pick. His second novel, The Queen of Fives, a cheeky story of the collision of con artists and royals, will be published by Graydon House/HarperCollins on January 21, 2025. Hay lives in London.

How did your academic study of history fuel your imagination--in particular, an interest in this time period and the depiction of strong women such as Quinn and Tor?

The main thrust of my degree was the late medieval and Renaissance period, and my dissertation looked at the political levers available to women at the early Tudor court. So there's definitely a theme here about female power-brokering in male-dominated settings.

But I think my affinity with the 19th century was really sparked even earlier than that. My childhood reading was filled with books like The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett, and in my teens I inhaled Victorian triple-deckers like Vanity Fair--there's nobody better than Becky Sharp for navigating a lethal drawing room. Sensation fiction like The Woman in White was a big influence, of course. I also adored Wives and Daughters by Elizabeth Gaskell--Lady Harriet Cumnor remains one of my favorite troubleshooting, horseback-riding characters in fiction. All grist to the mill, I suspect!

Various London properties have major roles in both novels. To what extent do you think of architecture as providing inspiration for plot? Do settings serve almost as memory palaces where you can watch scenes unfold?

You have lit on precisely how I work! I start by gluing together setting and story concept, often with not much more than a sense of mood or texture.

In The Queen of Fives, I knew I wanted to write a con that would move between a crumbling house in Spitalfields, East London, and a sumptuous red-brick mansion in an exclusive corner of Mayfair. So I wrote my way into both houses, twisting through the back streets of Spitalfields to find "The Château," the headquarters of Quinn Le Blanc, my con-woman protagonist. I consulted Charles Booth's 19th-century poverty maps and picked through old editions of the Survey of London to build a sense of her income, next-door neighbors, and prior landlords. Then I followed the same process for the high Gothic mansion on the opposite side of town. You peel open the doors, investigating the people within, and trust your subconscious to watch the drama unfold.

How did you arrive at the book's five-day structure? Was it modeled on a play?

There were actually a couple of practical considerations going on here. I thought it would be fun for me--and the reader--to give Quinn a rather strict and censorious rulebook, to provide a sort of warped moral code giving depth and irony and meaning to her actions. The number five has all sorts of symbolic resonances in literature and culture--the five-act structure in classical drama, as you say; the multiple historical meanings of pentagrams; and my ingenious editor spotted that the five of hearts is considered the marriage card in cartomancy--perfect symbolism for a con focused on tricking a duke into marriage in order to lift his fortune.

With all this in the mix, it made sense to me to compress the action to five days to keep it nice and tight. I enjoyed the challenge of asking, How on earth is Quinn going to trick the Duke of Kendal into marriage in less than a week? What are the five "levels" of her game? How will she move across her chessboard, deploy different maneuvers to sweep her obstacles aside? And what would happen if someone was planning their own grand counter-game against her?

Did you always picture yourself writing about criminal dynasties? Are you comfortable being classed as a mystery author, or are you indifferent to genre designations?

I just love writing about big houses and bad families! I'll have to speak to a psychologist to work out exactly where the motivation springs from, because I grew up quite happily as an only child living in an apartment with a single mother. And yet every time I start writing a book, I find myself constructing an opulent building filled with dangerous people.

Yes, I feel unutterably proud any time I'm classed as a mystery author. Suspense is a critical skill, one I'm always trying to hone. One of the authors I admire most in the world is Ruth Rendell, a crime writer who left behind the most extraordinary body of literature--and I actually think it's her use of genre expectations that makes her work so transcendent, so cathartic and unsettling. This is a rich field and I'm proud to be working in it.

Reviews often liken your work to Downton Abbey because of the upstairs-downstairs setup and the possibility of characters bridging that divide. Is it a comparison you're irked by or weary of? Why do you feel this situation still enthralls readers and viewers?

Ooh, no, I love this comparison! Downton is iconic, of course, and I adored the crispness and slipperiness of its precursor, Gosford Park, too. I also grew up watching Upstairs, Downstairs. Since most of us do NOT have a large staff of servants tending to our every whim, I think there's something escapist and horrifying, frankly, about the idea of paying people to live in your home and observe your every move. It would make my skin crawl. And what happens when the group below stairs try to grab power from the folk on the floors above? This question feels rich in opportunity for tension, irony, double-dealing, game playing, betrayal, humor and fun, and I try to throw all these ingredients into my books.

Your editor describes you as "one of the most charming people I have ever met" and your publicist calls you "the loveliest." Is there a contradiction between being a nice person in real life and writing about things like theft, double-crossing, and fraud?

This is so kind! I feel the same about them! But ha--perhaps the answer is that we ALL have lovely, delicious, devious, diabolical thoughts lurking at the back of our heads, but we just regulate them awfully well!

Seriously, my impulse is to write about people who want to right the wrongs they see around them, who craft their own (offbeat) morality to justify their actions and design their audacious schemes accordingly. Stories set in the late 1890s and early 1900s provide fertile ground for this: a sense of old rules dissolving, change coming. Rip-roaring robberies and cunning confidence schemes provide a way to ask: What does this person really want? How far are they willing to go to get it? And who will they become by the end of the book? This to me is the joy of reading and writing fiction. --Rebecca Foster