Goodreads asked Kimberly Bell:

Where did you get the idea for your most recent book?

Kimberly Bell History. It's almost always a historical event or person that gets my brain spinning.

In this case, it was an event in 1843 where a man from Manchester shot and killed the Prime Minister's secretary (mistaking him for the Prime Minister) as he was leaving downing street.

Despite the fact that he absolutely did it, when he went to trial he was not found guilty by reason of insanity--the first insanity defense that set the precedent--because the state of things in England was so bad at that time with regards to food and poverty and the poor dying in the streets that no one could really blame him.

The picture that paints of England is one I might expect of the 1600s, rather than Victoria's reign with locomotives and gas lights, so I decided to write about it. It was a time of great political unrest and social change in England, and I love dropping love stories into the middle of chaos.

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