AN ARTFUL DODGE

In this Victorian-era novel, a female thief wants to leave the game, but the only way out risks jail time—or worse.

It’s 1879 London, and the Society for the Suppression of Vice would surely have something to say about this novel’s narrator, 20-year-old Kit Jimeson, a member of an all-female thieving ring. The parentless Kit is obliged to look out for her 14-year-old sister, Sarah, who has recently begun working as a scullery maid. Sarah’s job isn’t far from a house where two servants are murdered in the course of a burglary; when Sarah admits to Kit that she spotted two men—the likely culprits—as she was walking past the house on the night of the murders, Kit becomes consumed with worry that the killers saw Sarah and will stop her from talking—permanently. So when Kit gets a chance to participate in a “special dodge”—it involves counterfeit jewels—that can indirectly ensure Sarah’s safety, Kit takes the job, knowing full well that “women thieves were sentenced to years in prison if the judge was feeling charitable and were hanged if the judge was not.” The plot doesn’t stray too far outside the bounds of reader expectations, putting the book in cozy-historical-crime-novel territory. In an author’s note, Odden, whose specialty is Victorian-era crime fiction, reports that the thieving ring was inspired by a real London girl gang formed in the 1870s, and Kit’s descriptions of her experiences inside and outside the ring are rife with punctilious period specifics, from restaurant decor to the method for hand-sewing buttonholes. Readers who begin the novel unconvinced they’ll soon be cheering on a protagonist who makes her living through wrongdoing won’t be riding their moral high horses for long.

Historical crime fiction at its most authentic.