“What class the murder was, what class the victim was, how the death occurred, all these things made a great deal of difference to public interest,” writes Judith Flanders. She’s referencing Victorian England, but she may as well be talking about the U.S. in the twenty-first century (and England and many other places, no doubt). A full century before the term “missing white woman syndrome” was coined, so much about justice in Victorian England resonates with frightening similarity to our own time and place. First […]
I’m not sure I’d look for a new start in a town called Lovecraft
Tyler, Kinsey and Bode Locke move with their mother to Keyhouse, their uncle’s mansion in Lovecraft, Massachusetts, after their father, a school guidance councillor, is brutally murdered by a couple of Tyler’s classmates. The entire Locke family are naturally extremely affected by the event, especially the eldest brother Tyler, who feels responsible for the event, and for not managing to rescue both his parents. Kinsey, his sister, was hiding and keeping their youngest brother Bode safe, but she’s suffering with survivor’s guilt and dealing with […]
Monks and Spies in Tudor England
Okay, I’ll confess I read this trilogy out of order, and–worse–I reviewed them out of order, but I still highly recommend them if, like me, you’re an afficionado of good historical mysteries. Even more so since I just learned that this “trilogy” is about to have a sequel. Anyway… In this third novel, it is now 1584 and our hero Giordano Bruno is being stalked by someone through the streets of London. He has made a lot of enemies in Parris’ previous two books, and […]
We Need to Talk About … Jacob
This book proved somewhat painful reading, but is well-plotted, well-written and packs quite an emotional wallop. Defending Jacob is half murder mystery and half courtroom drama, told from the standpoint of Jacob’s father, who is a first Assistant District Attorney at the start of the novel, and thus gets first dibs on one of the more sensational murders to hit his town, that of a 14-year-old boy found stabbed to death off a path in a popular park used by town kids to get to […]