The Last Vesper. The Two Misses Vesper, #5

A telegram says Verity Vesper is dead. Dinah knows immediately that it is lying. Months have passed since Verity and Dinah separated. They still write. They are not enemies. They are not strangers. But neither woman has found a way around the question that broke them apart: if someone manipulated the circumstances that brought them together, how much of what followed can truly belong to them?Then a telegram arrives in Manchester.
MISS DINAH VESPERVERITY VESPER IS DEADHidden inside it is an irregularity only Dinah understands-a signal Verity once taught her. The message means the opposite. Verity is alive. And someone desperately wants Dinah to behave as though she is not. While Dinah follows the physical trail through telegraph offices, railway routes, photographic evidence, and the English coast, Verity conducts an investigation of her own inside London's parliamentary and intelligence circles.
Altered correspondence, manufactured political scandals, and the remains of the secret JANUS network point toward a conspiracy built on one dangerous principle: control the information, and you control the choice. At its centre waits Sir Edric Halewyn, the man who claims responsibility not only for the conspiracy surrounding them-but for bringing the two Misses Vesper together in the first place. To defeat him, Dinah and Verity must do something more difficult than decipher a code or expose a spy.
They must work apart without controlling one another, trust without possessing, and decide whether a relationship born inside another man's design can become something entirely their own. Because a meeting can be engineered. A telegram can be falsified. A choice cannot. The Last Vesper is the fifth and final novel in The Two Misses Vesper, a Victorian sapphic espionage romance series combining coded telegrams, political intrigue, historical mystery, intelligent heroines, complex dialogue, and an emotionally intense love story.