THE MAN IN THE SHADOWS

In 1881 London, the World’s End Bureau takes on two wildly different cases.

After a slow start, sleuthing partners Lily Raynor and Felix Wilbraham are slowly building a reputation and a clientele that are not always to their liking. Now they’re approached by a minister who’s working with a flood of Jewish refugees fleeing Russia after the assassination of Czar Alexander II; he asks them to help an elderly woman whose whole family perished in the pogroms except for her young grandson, Yakov, whom she brought with her to London but who seems to have run away when she was taken to the hospital straight off the boat. A second case involves Jared Spokewright, who insists that his brother, Abel, was wrongly hanged for the murder of the sweetheart, Effie Quittenden, he met while hop-picking in Kent. Posing as a journalist, Felix heads for Crooked Green, where, as it happens, he has a relative, part of the extensive Smith family, while Lily goes to Whitechapel to speak to the Russian grandmother. Virtually everyone Felix meets tells him that Abel was innocent, encouraging him to seek out other suspects. Meanwhile, Lily finds that she’s taken on a very dangerous mission. Yakov is running for his life, pursued by dangerous elements of the Russian secret service who know he carries something more precious than the gold and jewels his grandmother had given him to guard.

Industrial London and rural Kent provide the Victorian backgrounds for two fascinating stories of love, hate, and madness.