The Perils of Painting Orchids (A Lady Vagabond's Adventures) (Volume 1)

Singapore, March 1861, a fast developing land of evergreen forests, mangrove swamps, tigers and crocodiles with a free trade port attracting pirates and a newly appointed British Governor trying to stabilise the volatile immigrant Chinese population. Miss Diana Westbury, 29 years old, botanical illustrator and orchid specialist, has heard the flowers in Singapore are beautiful, rare and endangered and arrives with her box of watercolour paints to record and collect them. But Diana’s father was an eminent archaeologist and on his last excavation to Egypt had made a startling discovery about a Pharaoh named in the Bible. To a Victorian society still reeling from Darwin’s paper ‘On the Origin of Species’ and a civil war looming in America, this discovery would cause chaos in the social order and ruin reputations. This truth must not come out and her father dies in suspicious circumstances before his paper can be published. Now Diana has finished his work and hidden the proof that confirms his findings but before its presentation to the world she leaves for Singapore on her own quest to find a fabled orchid. The race is now on to steal this proof and stop the presentation. Little does Diana realise that the civilised, scientific society of London could hold more danger for her than the tiger infested jungles of Singapore.