Rosella Kimber is the daughter of Billy Kimber, one of the biggest crime bosses in 1919 England. Tommy Shelby is the leader of the peaky blinders, a gang on the rise, threatening Kimber's rule.
When Tommy and Billy put their differences away and dec...
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KENT, TADLEY MANOR, 1919
IT'S POST-WAR and Birmingham has enough smoke in the air to choke you. Too many factories but somehow not enough jobs. Hungry children, liberated women, crime and gangs.
Gangs.
That's the key word.
Now, this book starts and ends with the Peaky Blinders; the most famous gang in all of Small Heath. Everyone there had a story or two about the Shelby's, whether it was true or not, didn't really matter.
The three eldest Shelby boys were more than brothers, blood wasn't enough to bind them together. For their peaky caps were their crowns and the blades sewn in them were their dazzling jewels. They were gangster princes, who like everybody else, wanted a piece of the world.
John Shelby was a fighting man, he said it how it was, he was loyal until the end.
Arthur Shelby was everything at once; cut-throat, brutal and irrational. He made jokes, and good ones too.
But Thomas Shelby, he stood out from the others. He could take on a mob with his bare fists, secure any business deal in the world. Believe people when they say, you'll never find another man like him in a lifetime.
But, we're not there just yet.
We're in a manor outside of London, in Kent, where Rosella Kimber, her twin brother Harry and her father, Billy Kimber, are staying. Rose's father, was a man that needed no introduction in Birmingham. Anything he wanted, he got. For he was the one and only Billy Kimber, he controlled most of the legal and illegal bookmaking sites at racecourses all across England.
And that alone, made him one of the country's richest and most powerful gangsters.
For now.
The door bursts open, and a rather drenched Rose coughs loudly, entering the manor.
"My dress is covered in mud, the dirt out there is seven feet deep, you'd think we're in the trenches!" Rose complains, holding her drenched skirt up.
Her dad and brother, who were smoking cigarettes in the living room, look up as she walks in.
"What do you know about bloody trenches, eh?" Billy taps excess ash off his cigarette, all his daughter had done was complain since they got here.
"Out there makes Birmingham look like heaven!" A gush of rain is blown into the house by the strong wind outside and Rose struggles to close the door behind her.
Unbothered, her dad opens up a newspaper. "Wouldn't expect Birmingham and heaven to be in the same sentence." He mutters to himself.
Rose, Harry and Billy had all been staying in a manor near Kent for the past couple days. Billy had promised them that it was a getaway, but of course, it was really just for business.
