May 1, 2019
Famous author and amateur sleuth Charles Dickens has struck up an unlikely friendship with budding writer Wilkie Collins, whose ambition is to become the next Dickens. But before that can happen, the pair are drawn into a tragic murder case in which the victim, Isabella, was a former resident of Urania Cottage, a home for young women down on their luck and of which Dickens is a patron. The rebellious Isabella left the cottage with her friend Sesina, and the pair found jobs as maids in a London boarding house. The night she died, Isabella told Sesina she was going to meet a man who would give her the life she had always dreamed of having. Of all the cases in which Dickens has been involved, this is one of the most byzantine. Just when he and Collins think they know who Isabella's killer is, they find they've been lured into pursuing false leads. A surprising conclusion, coupled with vivid characters, authentic period details, and a constantly zigzagging plot, makes this a good choice for fans of historical murder mysteries.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2019, American Library Association.)
February 1, 2018
Cork, Ireland, 1925. The Reverend Mother Aquinas, who runs a school for Cork's poorest children, receives a gift from a local auctioneeran old trunk labeled School Books. But when she opens the trunk, she's horrified to find the body of businessman Henry Mulcahy inside. The reverend mother has confronted death and murder before, so she knows exactly whom to callDr. Scher, to declare Mulcahy dead, and Inspector Patrick Cashman, to investigate the case. There are many suspects. One is Mulcahy's son, Fred, who rebelled against his strict father and joined the Republican Army. A second is Mulcahy's daughter, Susan, who wants to be a doctor but who, much against her will, has been promised in marriage to Mulcahy's business partner. Or perhaps the killer is Mulcahy's wife, who had been badly treated by her husband. When more deaths occur, the reverend mother decides she cannot wait for the police to solve the case and puts her own keen understanding of human nature and excellent deductive powers to use. A gripping plot, memorable characters, and authentic period ambience make for an engaging read.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2018, American Library Association.)
May 13, 2019
Set in Victorian London, this series launch from Harrison (the Burren series) lacks her usual inventiveness. Insp. Charles Field, the inspiration for Bleak House’s Inspector Bucket, invites authors Charles Dickens and Wilkie Collins to the morgue to view the body of a young woman who was strangled and thrown into the Thames. To Dickens’s horror, he recognizes the victim as Isabella Gordon, who once lived in Urania Cottage, the home Dickens set up for ex-con women to be trained in preparation for a new life in Australia. Gordon was booted out of the program two years earlier for being a troublemaker, and Collins and Dickens resolve to solve her murder. They get some information from Isabella’s friend Sesina, who left the halfway house right after Isabella. Sesina, who was working as a servant with Isabella, says that her friend left two nights earlier to meet someone, but doesn’t reveal that Isabella set up the assignation with blackmail on her mind. The plot doesn’t generate much steam, and other authors have done a better job of depicting Dickens and Collins as sleuths. Agent: Peter Buckman, Ampersand Agency (U.K.).
May 15, 2019
Harrison (Murder at the Queen's Old Castle, 2019, etc.) trots out a Victorian A-Team to investigate the death of a London housemaid no better than she should be. All is not well at No. 5, Adelphi Terrace. The building's residents, barrister Jeremiah Doyle, Yorkshire schoolmaster Frederick Cartwright, and rising journalists Jim Carstone and Benjamin Allen, are in a tizzy because saucy maid Isabella Gordon went missing shortly after hinting to her friend and fellow maid Sesina that she knew a secret a certain someone would pay handsomely to keep hidden. All too soon, Isabella's corpse is fished from the river, and Inspector Field, the real-life inspiration for Inspector Bucket in Bleak House, is called to investigate. Since Field's friend Charles Dickens still remembers Isabella as a notably noncompliant tenant of Urania Cottage, a home for unfortunate young women largely underwritten by Dickens, the celebrated novelist promptly interjects himself and his friend/colleague/amanuensis Wilkie Collins into the case. The pair, guided largely by Dickens' ebullient certainty that "I'm always right when I put my mind to a matter," decide for highly plausible reasons to focus their suspicions on Cartwright and for much more obscure reasons to fasten on Isabella's early, pre-blackmail, pre-Urania years for clues to her killing. Despite a plot twist borrowed from one of Agatha Christie's last novels, the results are never exactly surprising, but the Victorian atmosphere, filtered alternately through Sesina and Collins, is thick enough to cut with a knife. The real triumph is Harrison's Dickens: sublimely conceited, short-tempered, self-dramatizing, often bombastic, and perfectly matched with the infinitely less self-assured Collins. A sequel seems inevitable.
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