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.