River of Fallen Angels

November 7, 2022
Set in 1891 London, Rowland’s disappointing seventh Victorian mystery (after 2022’s Garden of Sins) depends on an improbable premise: Sarah Bain Barrett and two colleagues who are “crime photographers and reporters for the Daily World newspaper, covering mainly the East End,” have a special arrangement with the police: in exchange for publicizing police investigations to help them “catch killers,” the Daily World is given confidential information. Barrett hopes this arrangement will help crack a serial killer case after a woman’s body, apparently the latest victim of the Thames Torso Murderer, washes up at her feet while she’s covering an accident on the Thames. But the officer in charge, Insp. Edmund Reid, who believes that the Torso Murderer and Jack the Ripper are the same and that Barrett is withholding information about the Ripper, cuts her newspaper out of the inquiry. Aided by her husband, Thomas, a detective sergeant conveniently assigned to Reid’s Torso Task Force, Barrett and her colleagues search for the truth. The plot construction and characterizations fall short of the standard set by the author’s superior Sano Ichiro series. Historical mystery fans can safely pass. Agent: Pam Ahearn, Ahearn Agency.

November 15, 2022
A shutterbug sleuth pursues a brutal serial killer on the loose in Victorian London. April 1891. Sarah Barrett, a photographer for the Daily World, is shooting a construction worker who dangles precariously from London's Tower Bridge when she and a crowd of onlookers spot some body parts floating in the Thames below--remnants of what appears to be the latest of the Torso Murders. Having already solved the mystery of Jack the Ripper, Sarah finds herself drawn to the challenge of untangling this series of crimes as well. Her probe triggers the first threat to her post-honeymoon bliss with DS Thomas Barrett, her husband of less than a year. Thomas is clearly troubled but unwilling to share the reason why. Over the course of Sarah's previous cases, Rowland developed an engaging cast of supporting characters whom she introduces incrementally here so that new readers won't feel left behind. Sarah's flanked by Mick O'Reilly, who began as a Holmes-ian street urchin and has evolved into a mature, if impetuous, sidekick, and Lord Hugh Staunton, her longtime friend and confidant, exiled by his family because of his homosexuality. Sir Gerald Mariner, owner of the Daily World, seems always on the brink of firing Sarah because of her sleuthing; Inspector Edmund Reid of Scotland Yard is the perpetual rival whom she regularly beats to the solution. Sarah's investigative trail takes her through the city's Tenderloin, which is home to more victims and an array of flamboyant suspects. A brisk, atmospheric whodunit that continues the development of Rowland's core cast.

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Starred review from January 1, 2023
London, 1891. Crime-scene photographer Sarah Bain Bennett is forced to go head-to-head with her nemesis, Scotland Yard inspector Reid, to discover the identity of a killer the police have dubbed the Torso Murderer. Reid is convinced Torso and Jack the Ripper are the same person; Sarah, not so much. Does she know something about the Ripper? Reid thinks she does and is determined to find out what. The seventh in the author's Victorian-era mystery series is--no surprise here for her fans--simply wonderful. It was a bit of a surprise when Rowland first switched gears from her Sano Ichiro mysteries, set in feudal Japan, to late nineteenth-century England, but she brings the same close attention to small details, which deliver a vivid sense of historical time and place, to the Bennett books as she does to the Ichiro novels. In addition to all the usual virtues--rich characters, a you-are-there sense of realism, a captivating story--Rowland also offers up an interesting take on the lingering question of whatever happened to Jack the Ripper. A must-read for both the author's fans and all lovers of Victorian mysteries.

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