London, early June, 1926
The last Friday of every month, Christopher Astley, in the guise of his alter ego Kitty Dupree, has attended a covert drag ball somewhere in London. In April, the ball was interrupted by a police raid that Christopher escaped by the skin of his teeth, only because he was yanked out of the nightclub before the raid started by someone who knew that it was going to happen.
This month, the gathering has moved from the last Friday of the month to the first Saturday of the next, and the arranger has found a new venue. On the first weekend in June, everyone gathers in the old Rectors Club on Tottenham Court Road for a grand old time.
All this is why Christopher's cousin Philippa Darling is alone in the flat she shares with Christopher when Christopher's other cousin, Crispin, Viscount St George, sails through the door three sheets to the wind from celebrating his twenty-third birthday with his usual crowd of extremely fast Bright Young People.
And when a sozzled St George, along with an always-inquisitive Pippa, decide to get dressed up and crash Christopher's drag ball, the night ends with the dead body of a tabloid reporter on the floor of a Mayfair flat, and enough motives for murder to populate an entire wing of Wormwood Scrubs Penal Institution.
Now Pippa and Christopher must determine who wanted the gossip hound dead badly enough to do something about it, all while trying to keep Crispin's name out of the press and their own heads above water.