"In Bleak House, competing claims of love and inheritance--complicated by murder--have given rise to a costly and decades-long legal battle that one litigant refers to as 'the family curse.' The insidious London fog that rises from the river Thames and seeps into the very bones of the characters symbolizes the pervasive corruption of the legal system and the society that supports it, targets of Dickens's satirical wrath"--Page 2 of cover.

"In an alternative version of Victorian London, a seventeen-year-old Dodger, a cunning and cheeky street urchin, unexpectedly rises in life when he saves a mysterious girl, meets Charles Dickens, and unintentionally puts a stop to the murders of Sweeny Todd"--