1895:
Former Scotland Yard detective Daniel Wilson and his archaeologist
partner Abigail Fenton have been hired by Manchester Museum
to look into two murders. Both victims were poor women and
nobody knows their identity; the police aren’t interested
in pursuing the deaths of two nobodies and prove obstructive
to the idea of private sleuths investigating. Before one of
the women was killed she had visited the barracks and was
asking questions about events from eighty years earlier. But
surely nobody that old is likely to be still alive?
I wasn’t sure about this series when I read the first
entry but have been finding that it gets better and better.
Like all the best mysteries the tale starts with a mysterious
murder (or two) and as the detectives uncover more and the
pool of suspects widens the story gets more exciting. After
their last case where the local police were helpful this time
they are anything but. Abigail is an archaeologist, and in
this book we get to see that she is quite famous and rather
surprisingly none of her fellows seem to resent the fact that
she is a woman. I don’t know enough about how female
archaeologists were viewed in the 1890s to comment with authority
but it seemed surprising. Daniel and Abigail are an item and
very much in love, but this is not a romantic novel and thus
the pair is free to spend every page detecting. They don’t
keep snipping at one another in the cliché battle of
the sexes that mars too many novels but get on with the job,
their skills complementing each other. There is a lot in the
story, with the odd infodump moment pertaining to Manchester
in the 1890s and eighty years earlier but mostly 100% pure
detective novel. I hope this series runs for a good long time.
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