THE DIABOLICAL BONES

Skeletal remains attract the sympathy and scrutiny of a not-yet-famous trio of Victorian-era sisters.

The faithful housekeeper of the Brontë sisters—Charlotte, Emily, and Anne—disturbs a quiet afternoon in December 1845 with dreadful news. Clifton Bradshaw, the owner of Top Withens Hall, has uncovered a bundle of child’s bones in the chimney niche in his late wife’s rooms, shut up since her death 13 years earlier. The sisters, daughters of a parson, are concerned with the soul of the child and the reason the bones were hidden away. Emily is particularly impatient because their last case as detectors, in which they styled themselves Bell Brothers and Company, was just a search for a missing cow. The three women and their brother, Branwell, brave the winter snows and the wrath of Bradshaw, who’s violent, abusive, and more often than not drunk since the death of his wife. Although he refuses to surrender the bones for Christian burial, his son smuggles them out to the sisters, whose careful notes about them help a female friend with medical training speculate that the deceased was a malnourished child laborer. Moved by the pitiful tale, the sisters uncover a sensational mix of old and new religions, a ghostly woman in black, a local visionary who knows dark magic, and orphans terrified of a monstrous figure who steals children—and then starts stalking the Brontës themselves.

Ellis takes gothic over the top in the second fictional adventure of her real-life characters.