Three years after explorer Lady Verena Ashdown was declared dead, she steps from a London cab and into the surgery of the woman who mourned her. She is thinner, scarred, exhausted—and chained to a battered leather case she refuses to surrender. Dr. Ginevra Quade should be grateful simply to have Verena alive. Instead, the physician in her notices what love cannot ignore: Verena's wounds do not match the story she tells.

Within hours, someone tries to kill Verena. Then a surviving member of her lost expedition is found murdered beside a strange meridian mark. The trail leads from fogbound railway yards and a burning warehouse in Marseille to a dangerous Mediterranean crossing, the crowded streets of Tangier, and an abandoned coastal signal station that should contain nothing at all.

As Ginevra follows the evidence, she discovers that Verena was not merely lost. Her disappearance was engineered by people who understand that maps are power—and that the most valuable geography may be the geography deliberately erased. But the deeper Ginevra digs, the harder it becomes to separate the mystery of Verena's missing years from the secrets Verena still believes she has the right to keep.

To survive what comes next, the two women must rebuild more than a case. They must rebuild a partnership on equal terms, even as the evidence points toward a conspiracy that began in Britain before Verena ever departed on the expedition that was supposed to kill her.

The Woman Who Returned from the Dead is Book 1 of The Uncharted Ladies, a sweeping Victorian adventure-romance series of lost maps, dangerous journeys, historical mystery, and two women determined to uncover what the world was told to forget.