SEASON OF DARKNESS

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.