Bethlehem Road - Anne Perry

   1990; 313 pages.  Book 10 (out of 32) in the “Charlotte and Thomas Pitt” series.  New Author? : No.  Genres : Murder-Mystery; Historical Fiction.  Overall Rating : 7*/10.

 

    It was a gruesome murder, right there on Westminster Bridge.  The poor bloke first had his throat slashed, then he was tied up to a lamppost.  It made him look like he was leaning against it.

 

    But the real shocker was the fact that the dead man was a member of Parliament, and had been in a meeting there up until a few minutes ago.  The victim was literally walking home from work, even though it was late at night.

 

    For Inspector Thomas Pitt of the Bow Street Police Force, it means that there is tremendous pressure to solve the case, and fast.  The daily newspapers will be running screaming headlines, which will terrify lords and commoners.  Within 24 hours, everyone will be demanding this case be solved immediately.

 

    Sadly, Pitt’s investigation will find promising leads few and far between.  Can things get any worse?

 

    Well maybe.  Suppose a second M.P. (“Member of Parliament”) were to get killed in exactly the same way, while walking across Westminster Bridge, late at night, on his way home.

 

What’s To Like...

    I loved the historical fiction aspect of Bethlehem Road.  As a tourist, I’ve been to the area London portrayed here, but that was in the daytime and in sunshiny weather.  To be immersed in it in Victorian times, at night, and in pea soup fog, was quite different. 

 

    Politically, the Victorian-era England was at a crucial time.  Ireland was demanding independence. Movements were afoot for prison reform, “poor law” reform, and industrial reform.  Anarchists and socialists were carrying out acts of violence, and ordinary citizens chafed under the rigid social class system.  Perhaps most significant of all, the movement for equal rights for women, including the right to vote, was gathering a large number of grassroots supporters, including Charlotte Pitt.

 

    The action starts right away.  Hetty, a street prostitute, propositions the first victim, only to discover he’s dead as a doornail.  Inspector Thomas Pitt discovers there are all sorts of possible motives this murder, including political, familial, accidental, and psychiatric ones.  His wife, Charlotte, also gets drawn into the investigation without his knowledge, on behalf of a friend of one of the main suspects.

 

    There are a number of red herrings along the way for the reader and Thomas Pitt to come to grips with.  A couple of plot twists finally lead to a tension-filled ending, resolving both who was the so-called “Westminster Cutthroat”, and why they did it.  Overall, I’d call Bethlehem Road more of a police procedural than a whodunit.  More on this in a bit.

 

Kewlest New Word ...

Kip (v.) : To take a nap; to sleep.

Others: Tweeny (n.).

 

Ratings…
    Amazon: 4.4*/5, based on 1,636 ratings and 151 reviews.

    Goodreads: 3.97*/5, based on 4,620 ratings and 208 reviews.

 

Excerpts...

    “Anarchists?” Pitt pressed.

    Deacon shook his head.  “Nah!  This in’t the way their mind goes.  Stick a shiv in some geezer on Westminster Bridge!  Wot good’d that do ‘em?  They’d go for a bomb, summink showy.  Loves bombs, they do.  All talk, they are—never do nuffink so quiet.”

    “Then what is the word down here?”

    “Croaked by someone as ‘ated ‘him, personal like.”  Deacon opened his little eyes wide.  “In’t no flam—I makes me livin’ by blowin’, I’d be a muck sniped in a munf if I done that!  In’t quick enough to thieve no more.  I’d ‘ave ter try a scaldrum dodge, an that in’t no way ter live!”   (loc. 1046)

 

    “Who should she say she was searching for?  It must not be someone in such circulation that Zenobia should have found her for herself.  Ah!  Beatrice Allenby was just the person.  She had married a Belgian cheesemaker and gone to live in Bruges!  No one could be expected to know that as a matter of course.  And Mary Carfax would enjoy relating that: it was a minor scandal, girls of good family might marry German barons or Italian counts, but not Belgians, and certainly not cheesemakers of any sort!  (loc. 2535)

 

Kindle Details…

    Bethlehem Road presently sells for $8.99 at Amazon.  The other e-books in the series go anywhere from $1.99 to $12.99.  That price range also holds true for Anne Perry’s 24-book William Monk detective series, some of which I’ve read and enjoyed in the past.

 

 

“Those who hold power have never in all history been inclined to relinquish it willingly.”  (loc. 2957)

    There is only a negligible amount of cussing in Bethlehem Road.  I noted just five instances, all of them four-lettered words of the “mild” eschatological variety.

 

    There was one missing comma in the e-book format: “sorry constable”, and one spelling mangling: “Ametiryst/Amethyst”, but I have a feeling that second one was a scanning boo-boo.

 

    My biggest quibble with Bethlehem Road was the murder-mystery plotline.  For most of the book it felt like none of the suspects and leads were plausible.  The end of the book was looming, and magically, out of left field, comes a whole new, promising angle.  True, Thomas and the reader both have to pick up on this, but it was way too much of a convenient coincidence.  Curse those dei ex machina!

 

    So read this book for its excellent historical fiction insights and accept the fact that you and the Bow Street Police Department are not going to solve this mystery until the deus ex machina pops out of nowhere.

 

    Which is how police procedurals are usually structured.

 

    7 Stars.  One last bit of wit.  At one point Thomas Pitt requests some records from one of the suspects.  The man complies and will have copies made on something he calls “an awful contraption” and which “sounds like a hundred urchins in hobnail boots”.  What on earth is he talking about?

 

    A recently invented thing called a “typewriter.”

Dodger - Terry Pratchett

   2012; 353 pages.  New Author? : No.  Genres : Action-Intrigue; Historical Fiction; British Literature; Humor.  Overall Rating : 7*/10.

 

    Sooner or later, you pay for every good deed you do in life.  Dodger just learned that the hard way.

 

    He had just popped out of the sewers when a pretty young girl jumped out of a passing carriage and tried to run away.  Two thugs followed her out of the carriage, chased her down, and started beating the damsel.

 

    Dodger may be young, but life on the streets has toughened him, so he pounced on the assailants, drove them off, and rescued the young lady.  But there are no secrets in the rookeries of London.  Now powerful people are offering lots of money for information about the escaped girl.

 

    And for information about the whereabouts of the brazen young lad who helped her flee.

 

What’s To Like...

    Dodger is one of the few Terry Pratchett novels that is not part of the Discworld series, nor even set there.  The story takes place in Victorian-era England and there’s not a single fantasy creature to be found.  Dodger is the street name of the protagonist, a 17-year-old tosher, which, if you’ve never heard of that term (and I hadn’t) means a person who scavenges in the underground sewers.  It’s a historically real profession; Wikipedia has a page about it here.

 

    Terry Pratchett infuses the text with a bunch of 19^th-century English terms, some of which are listed below, plus at least one example of Cockney rhyming slang, here involving the name “Richard”.  One of the main side characters, Solomon Cohen, is Jewish, so a number of Yiddish expressions also crop up.  The characters are a nice blend of real and fictional people, and Pratchett lets you know which are which in the "Author’s Acknowledgments" section in the back of the book.  All of this, plus Pratchett’s writing skills, created a fantastic “feel” for the early 1800s London setting, both above ground and below.

 

    The storyline is straightforward.  After being rescued by our heroic street urchin, the damsel in distress is taken in by a well-to-do family for safekeeping while recovering from her wounds.  A second fortuitous circumstance adds to Dodger being hailed as a hero in both high and low social circles, and he is forced to learn the ways of fraternizing with those of the upper class.  At the same time, Dodger has to contend with thugs of evil intent, while also learning how to go about courting the rescued damsel.

 

    Footnotes, always a Pratchett delight, are occasionally used, albeit sparingly.  The text is divided into 16 chapters, something the author rarely resorts to.  The tone of the story is darker than Pratchett’s Discworld novels (at one point a miscarriage is alluded to); it would have been awkward to try to fit this tale into that series.  But the author’s trademark wit and attention to details are still delightfully and abundantly present.

 

    I liked the references to subjects like Boadicea, Spinoza, angels, and metaphysics.  The inclusion of “The Lady of the Sewers”, aka Cloacina, aka “the goddess of the sewers” was a clever touch.  It was fun to learn the differences between a snakesman, a waterman, a tosher, and a mudlark.  And I hope to never run afoul of Argos Panoptes.

 

Kewlest New Word ...

    Firkytoodle (v.) : to canoodle, cuddle, fondle amorously.

    Others: Toshing (n.); Bubele (n., Yiddish), Shonky Shop (n.); Rookeries (n., plural), Schmutter (n., Yiddish); Growler (n.); Percys (n., plural); Mogadored (v., British), Hey-ho-rumbelow (n., phrase); Waterman (n.), and many more.

 

Ratings…
    Amazon:  4.5/5 based on 3,317 ratings and 1,215 reviews.

    Goodreads: 3.94/5 based on 26,049 ratings and 3,101 reviews.

 

Excerpts...

    Dodger wasn’t a thief; not at all.  He was. . . well, he was good at finding things.  After all, sometimes things fell off carts and carriages, didn’t they?  He had never stuck his hand into somebody else’s pocket.  Well, apart from one or two occasions when it was so blatantly open that something was bound to fall out, in which case Dodger would nimbly grab it before it hit the ground.  That wasn’t stealing: that was keeping the place tidy, and after all, it only happened what?  Once or twice a week?  (pg. 15)

 

    Dodger had once asked Solomon why he had chosen to come to England, and Solomon had said, “Mmm, well, my dear, it seems to me that in the pinch most governments settle for shooting their people, but in England they have to ask permission first.  Also, people don’t much mind what you’re doing as long as you’re not making too much noise.  Mmm, I like that in a country.”  (pg. 118)

 

If you wanted to be a successful urchin you needed to study how to urch.  (pg. 78)

     The cussing is sparse in Dodger, only 9 instances in the first 20% of the book.  All of those were what I’d call “mild profanity”, and none were f-bombs.

    Sadly, despite Terry Pratchett being one of my all-time favorite authors, there are some nits to pick here.

 

    Everything builds towards good-vs-evil showdown, but alas, things went down way too conveniently in the climax.  For all of their fearsome reputation, the baddies get vanquished way too easily.  Nevertheless, the final chapter is a heartwarming Epilogue, where we get to see how Dodger’s life subsequently unfolds.

 

    An even bigger issue involves the philosophical asides throughout the storyline itself.  Dodger frequently stops to contemplate his lifestyle vis-a-vis that of the various upper crust folks he encounters.  The first couple times he does this, his musings are rather enlightening.  But by the hundredth time he ruminates, you just want to ask him to stop obsessing and think about something else.

 

    Summing up, Dodger is a one-off novel, which conceivably could have been developed into a series, but never was.  I think that’s for the best.  Terry Pratchett is at his best when penning lighthearted fantasy novels.  He certainly has enough skills to also write dark historical fiction, but it won’t be his finest hour.  If you want to see him shine, pick up any of his early Discworld novels.

 

    7 Stars.  Here’s my favorite new Victorian era slang phrase gleaned from reading Dodger: “Tuppence more and up goes the donkey.”  It’s in the Acknowledgment section, and Terry Pratchett laments that he couldn’t find a way to work it into the story.  Google it for enlightenment.

Mycroft and Sherlock - Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and Anna Waterhouse

   2018; 411 pages.  New Author(s)? : No.  Book 2 (out of 3) in the Mycroft Holmes series.  Genres : Historical Mysteries; Victorian England; British Detectives.  Overall Rating:  8*/10.

 

    London in November 1872.  For Mycroft Holmes, it’s good to be back home after a thrilling adventure in the New World on the island of Trinidad.  Now he’s got a comfortable government job as “Special Consul to the Secretary of State for War".

 

    A pair of friends that Mycroft met in Trinidad have also accompanied him back to England and are loving it.  Cyrus Douglas now runs an apprentice school catering to street urchins.  And Huan is happily employed by Mycroft as both his carriage driver and bodyguard.

 

    Yes, life is good for Mycroft right now.  Indeed, his biggest source of stress is his somewhat wayward younger brother, Sherlock, who’s everything Mycroft is not: energetic, lanky in build, rash in temperament, and bored silly with having to study the musty old language of Latin.

 

    But there’s murder afoot in Victorian London: someone is gruesomely slicing up various lowlifes in the local Chinese community in Savage Gardens.  Sherlock finds the killings worthy of cogitation, but Mycroft doesn’t, since violent deaths in the slums of London are not that uncommon.

 

    But then one of Cyrus Douglas’s students ends up dead from a drug overdose, and the two Holmes brothers jump into action.  It’s a pity though, that they both pursue their investigation separately, and neither one wants to share their findings with the other.

 

    Such lack of communication could be deadly.

 

What’s To Like...

    Mycroft and Sherlock is the second Holmesian collaboration between Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and Anna Waterhouse, but unlike the first book (reviewed here) where Mycroft was the featured protagonist, now he and Sherlock get equal billing.

 

    The storyline quickly becomes more complex.  Beyond investigating the "whodunit" of the abovementioned murders, Mycroft and Sherlock now have to:

    a.) deal with the Queen wanting Mycroft to “fix” an upcoming soccer match,

    b.) determine the tangled web of reasons behind the killing of the young student,

    c.) look into a suspicious shipwreck in Dorset, although Cyrus will do that, as the cargo that was lost in the accident was owned by him,

    d.) try to decipher fifteen mysterious “codes” scratched on subway walls in various subway stations.

    Woven throughout all of these plotlines is a trail of drug usage, which is not a spoiler since there’s an image of a hypodermic needle on the book cover, as well as at the start of every chapter.

 

    I loved the tie-ins to the Sir Arthur Conan Doyle series.  Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and Anna Waterhouse present plausible backstories for things like Sherlock’s opium habit, why he plays the violin, how he came to organize the “Baker Street Irregulars”, and why Mycroft leads such a sedentary lifestyle.  We even get our first glimpse of Sherlock’s future landlady, Mrs. Hudson.

 

    I liked the “feel” of Victorian-era London, especially since I presume both authors are American.  The colloquialisms of that time were also fun, such as a “jimmy-grant” (immigrant), “bruvver-in-loss”, “fresh squab and mash”, “peeler” (cop), and my favorite, a “knocker-upper”, which turns out to be a window-cleaner.

 

    Along the way, we learn a little chemistry (how to make a more potent opiate), a little Latin (as does Sherlock), and a little Mandarin Chinese (“shòu-shòu”).  We visit an opium den, and read the Agony Columns in the newspaper, and, best of all, are treated to numerous instances of startling observations and deductions by both Holmes brothers.  Arthur Conan Doyle would be proud.

 

    The ending is suitably complex and exciting.  It’s not particularly twisty, but hey, if the sleuthing is done right, there shouldn't be any unplanned turns of events.  The final chapter is a revealing Epilogue, containing a bunch of explanations about the whys and wherefores of Mycroft and Sherlock solving the case.

 

Kewlest New Word ...

Autodidact (n.) : a self-taught person.

Others: Chockablock (adj.).

 

Things That Sound Dirty But Aren’t…

    “I wants to be a knocker-upper, Mr. Capps, cuz I already knows how to count to twelve.”  (pg. 60)

 

Ratings…
    Amazon: 4.6*/5, based on 338 ratings.

    Goodreads: 4.02*/5, based on 2,404 ratings and 349 reviews

 

Excerpts...

    “They find it [the corpse] just this morning,” Huan added,

    “Ah.  And who is the ‘they’ who found it?” Mycroft asked.

    “A publican,” Huan replied.  “Closing shop, two in the night it was, good working man, walking home, and he go falling over a body in the dark!”

    “Dear, I hope he was not injured,” Mycroft replied.

    “Oh no, he was dead.  Cut up in four pieces!”

    “No, I mean the publican.”  (pg. 14)

 

    “I am coming with you, of course!”

    “Thank you, no,” Douglas replied.

    “Mr. Douglas.  You are fatigued and lack proper nourishment.  You have also abused your tendons and muscles most unmercifully.  And I can glean from how you sit that your lower back and right hip are in some distress.  Not to mention that your left cornea has been scratched by sand –“

    “Does this soliloquy have a point?” Douglas interrupted, inadvertently rubbing his injured left eye while hating himself for proving the smug little sot correct.  (pg. 93)

 

“What harm could one more night of Latin possibly do?”  (pg. 302)

    There’s not much to nitpick about in Mycroft and Sherlock.  Some of the plotline tangents seemed a bit awkward, such as the soccer match meddling by Mycroft.  It was hard to see how that contributed to the tale, other than showing how the Holmes brothers’ brilliant deductive reasoning can be utilized in areas other than crime-solving.

 

   Ditto for the Royal Adelaide shipwreck.  Yes, it provided an important clue, but its timing seemed incredibly opportunistic, enabling Sherlock to become actively involved in Cyrus’s apprentice school.

 

    For me, the London setting wasn’t nearly as exotic as Book One’s Trinidad locale.  Also, I still find Mycroft more fascinating than Sherlock, but I recognize the need to bring the more famous brother into the series, and it must be admitted that the authors did a wonderful job of doing so.

 

    That’s about it.  Overall, Mycroft and Sherlock kept my interest from start to finish, and I still think Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and Anna Waterhouse do the best job of replicating the spirit and tone of the Arthur Conan Doyle series.  Lord knows, there are lots of poor imitations out there.

 

    8 Stars.  Book One, Mycroft Holmes, came out in 2016.  This book followed in 2018, and the third one, Mycroft and Sherlock: The Empty Birdcage was published in 2019.  Alas, since then. there have been no more installments, which leads me to wonder if Kareem and Anna have moved on to other projects.  I, for one, would be bummed if that's the casen my opinion, that would be a real bummer.

A Curious Beginning - Deanna Raybourn

2015, 337 pages. New Author? : Yes. Book 1 (out of 6) in the "Veronica Speedwell mysteries" series. Genres: Murder-Mystery; Historical Mystery; Victorian England. Overall Rating : 8*/10.

Veronica Speedwell has reached a conclusion: it's time to move on. She's just left the funeral for Aunt Nell, with whom she'd always had a tepid relationship, but who had served as her sole guardian these last three years, ever since Aunt Lucy, her other guardian, passed away.

Veronica's only in her 20's, but has already traveled throughout the world in search of all sorts of bugs, and specializing in butterflies. She is a leading lepidopterist, and has published papers on her finds, albeit under the ambiguous name of "V. Speedwell". This is after all 1887 London, and women are expected to have children, not careers.

So with the little bit of money she's tucked away, young Veronica is poised to venture out into the world on her own. No need for any companions, all she needs to do is make a quick stop at Aunt Nell's cottage for a few items of clothing and other traveling gear.

Alas, when she opens the door, she discovers the house has been ransacked. Drawers opened and emptied, pillows and mattresses slashed open. Someone has been looking for something. And that someone is still in the cottage, a huge broad-shouldered brute who has mayhem on his mind.

Okay, so maybe just for this moment, Veronica could use a companion.

What’s To Like...

A Curious Beginning is the opening novel in a six-book series (the Wikipedia information is outdated, only listing four books) by Deanna Raybourn featuring our fledgling and feminist sleuth Veronica Speedwell and her curmudgeonly cohort Mr. Stoker. I liked that Veronica's daytime job is a lepidopterist ("butterfly collector"), lately it seems like every adventure novel I read has a hero who's an archaeologist. Mr. Stoker is a taxidermist, and that's a refreshingly different career as well.

The story is told in the first-person POV (Veronica's), and is set entirely in the greater London area. The chapters are relatively short - 29 of them covering 337 pages. There's only a sprinkling of cussing: I counted only six instances in the first third of the book, and I don't recall any other R-rated stuff, so this almost qualifies as a cozy mystery.

The writing is both witty and polished. Both Stoker and Veronica are experts at repartee, and it was fun to listen to them verbally spar with each other. The Victorian setting felt authentic to me, and I was impressed by how "British-sounding" the text was since the author is American.

It is obvious that the book was well-researched. I learned what a "rebenque fight" was, got introduced to a Greek philosopher named Xenocrates, had to wiki an artist named Cabanel (who is cited twice in the story) and his painting "Fallen Angel", and enjoyed the mention of "penny dreadfuls". On a personal note, I loved that the pet dog was named "Huxley"; we once had a dog with that name.

The ending is good, being clever, suitably exciting, and with a nice twist in the epilogue portion of the last chapter. The primary plot threads - the "murder" and "mystery" angles - are resolved nicely, but other things, such as a the fate of the main baddie, are left open, perhaps to pop up again in subsequent tales.

Kewlest New Word ...

Belvedere (n.) : a small house or structure, sometimes with one side open, designed to give a beautiful view.

Others: Hob (n.); Snug (n.).

Ratings…

Amazon: 4.4/5 based on 1,119 ratings.

Goodreads: 3.95/5 based on 24,315 ratings and 3,739 reviews.

Excerpts...

"You are Lord Rosemorran?"

He blinked several times, as if trying to recall something. "Rosemorran? Oh yes. That's me. I say, have we met?"

"I am afraid not. My name is Veronica Speedwell, and I am trespassing."

"Trespassing? How very original. We do get the odd vagrant creeping about the place from time to time, but never a woman, at least not a clean woman with good vowels who could spot a lord at five paces. Any particular reason for trespassing here?" (pg. 224)

"I am not going to Ireland."

"Why not?"

"Have you been to Ireland? The climate is appalling. Nothing but mist."

"What is your objection to mist?"

I regarded him with the same disdain with which I had beheld my first Turkish toilet. "It is gloomy. Butterflies like the sun. Ireland is for the moth people."

"You are a lepidopterist," he said repressively. "You are not supposed to discriminate against moths." (pg. 249)

"Australia is full of unsuitable people - you will fit in beautifully." (pg. 4838)

It's hard to find things in A Curious Beginning to nitpick about. News of the murder doesn't arrive until the end of chapter six, and even then our two heroes don't really start to investigate it for another hundred pages or so. The list of possible suspects is pretty short, but keep in mind the tale is more about solving the whole mystery than just the murder portion.  

The time spent in the traveling circus seemed tad bit tangential; I didn't feel like it moved the storyline forward, In fairness though, it served to recount how Stoker and Veronica endeavored to develop a working relationship with one another. I thought the riddle - "BOLOXST" - seemed pathetically easy to solve, but then was chagrined to find my "solution" was erroneous.

8 Stars. I found A Curious Beginning to be a great combination of historical fiction and murder-mystery, two of my favorite genres, and I thoroughly enjoyed the book. Book 4 of the series, A Dangerous Collaboration, is on my Kindle, and I'm looking forward to reading more about Veronica and Stoker's adventures.