SEX IN LONDON — Elizabeth Coldwell

Long before the oh-so-kinky Victorian era, London was famed for sex and sensuality. From Kings to harlots, everyone was doing it â€" and often Kings were doing it with harlots.

Beneath its stiff upper lip, passion sizzles: everyone who lives, works and plays in London has a bedtime story to tell, and this collection brings together stories that explore the sex life of this amazing city. The stories here feature everyone from city boys on a bender in a lapdancing club to a light-fingered shoplifter who meets her match in a dominant Oxford Street security guard to a transgender lesbian out to hustle a lecherous aristocrat for a fortune. In Lucy Felthouse's "Her Majesty's Back Garden" a couple are overcome with the urge to have sex in the grounds of Buckingham Palace, while Jay Lawrence's "Double Exposure" features a female flasher displaying her charms in front of the London Eye, among other places. A pair of very naughty soldiers have each other standing at attention on Royal Wedding day in Lukas Scott's "A Happy Finish," and James "Grim" Desborough's "Falling Down" uses the mundane setting of a Tube journey as the starting point for an erotic game of chase. Victoria Pond's "Day Trip" looks at London from the point of view of a student visitor to the city, while Neil James Hudson's "The Woman From Aldgate West" imagines a London lurking beneath the surface of the one we know, where sex takes place in public beneath the noses of unsuspecting passers-by.

So join these and other authors on a trip into the quirky, kinky heart of London ... enjoy!