Two wards of the Grimsby family are forced to fend for themselves in a terror-filled winter in the industrial town of Blastburn.
This novel evidently takes place in the same fictional world as the Wolves Chronicles. Blastburn, the fictional setting of this work, features as the location of Mrs. Brisket's orphanage in The Wolves of Willoughby Chase, but does not otherwise bring elements of the other books. Its setting and time period resemble and satirise the height of the Victorian manufacturing years, rather than the Georgian setting of the other books. "Joan Aiken follows all the conventions of Dickensian fiction with just a little extra to satisfy jaded contemporary tastes. The Grimsby mansion at Midnight Court houses not one, but two unjustly disinherited orphans ..."
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