The Ring

September 23, 2013
Christopher “Kit” Marlowe has achieved fame as a playwright in Trow’s intricately plotted fifth historical featuring the scholar and former secret intelligence officer (after Scorpions’ Nest). Unfortunately, on the opening night of Kit’s play Tamburlaine at London’s Rose theater, landlady Eleanor Marchant is fatally shot in her seat, apparently by a stage gun wielded by bit player Will Shakespeare. When the authorities find that Will is Eleanor’s boarder and that Eleanor and her seductive sister, Constance, attended the play as his guests, he is jailed. At great personal peril, the swashbuckling, witty Kit attempts to prove Will innocent, along the way encountering illegal moneylending, two more murders, sexual intrigue, and lots of unrepentant rogues. Some playful anachronisms notwithstanding, lovers of the period will enjoy the appearances by historical figures, irreverent glimpses of Elizabethan theater, and richly detailed depictions of a corrupt, colorful city.

November 1, 2013

Marlowe's friend Will Shakespeare stands accused of murder when an onstage musket shot kills a member of the audience. Kit must get to the root of the problem in his fifth entry (after Scorpions' Nest).

Copyright 2013 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

November 1, 2018
While it may be difficult to imagine a story that successfully combines lighthearted humor with multiple gruesome murders, Trow manages to do it brilliantly in this latest installment of the Grand and Batchelor historical-mystery series. Their latest outing, set in 1873, has the pair investigating the kidnapping of Emilia Byng, wife of London tea merchant Selwyn Byng, who claims he can't pay the ransom unless he has access to Emilia's substantial trust fund, which she's not due to receive until she turns 35. The plot begins to thicken when a woman's mutilated body is dragged from the Thames, and the detectives find that Byng has omitted vital information in his description of the kidnapping. It's hard not to like Grand, a wealthy American, and Batchelor, a British ex-journalist who's had to scratch for a living, or to fail to laugh at some of their more outrageous adventures, even as they are investigating the most brutal crimes. These qualities, added to engaging style and a gripping plot, make this one a sure bet for historical-mystery fans.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2018, American Library Association.)

October 1, 2013
With the occasional snappy retort or quote from Shakespeare and Marlowe, this witty fifth mystery in the Kit Marlowe series keeps pace with the others as a decent puzzle and divertissement. Readers are advised to peruse the series in order, or wrestle with the many names and relationships introduced here. Kit Marlowe, playwright and sometime Queen's spy, uses his myriad connections and knowledge of London's political and underworld dramatis personae to clear William Shakespeare's name of a full-view, onstage killing and solve two possibly related murders. The leisurely pace and daily difficulties of Elizabethan life, evoked with an ornate style and the sometimes obscure vocabulary of the time (snaphaunce, deodand, catchpole), along with droll situational humor, focus attention on Marlowe's creative wit and his opponents' deceitful illusions more than on the puzzle's solution. A few anachronisms mar the telling ( Cambridge was so six months ago ), but fans of the series and of Edward Marston's amusing Elizabethan theater mysteries, featuring Nicholas Bracewell, will enjoy Kit Marlowe's part in the drama at the Crimson Rose.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2013, American Library Association.)

October 22, 2018
Trow tries too hard to be funny in his unimpressive fifth Victorian whodunit featuring private detectives Matthew Grand and James Batchelor (after 2017’s The Island). When the wife of timber importer Selwyn Bing fails to return to London following a visit to an aunt, and Bing subsequently receives a note demanding £5,000 pounds for her safe return, he turns to Grand and Batchelor for help. The detectives’ inquiries coincide with a series of grim discoveries of portions of a woman’s body, starting with the left part of a torso, recovered from the Thames. Meanwhile, murderer William Bisgrove escapes from Broadmoor, the notorious hospital for the criminally insane. In one gratuitous scene, the banter between Batchelor, who’s pretending to be a member of the Thames River Police, and a shrewd landlady, who asks him pointed questions, amuses, but it otherwise jars in a crime novel involving a gruesome murder, as do the antics of a bungling maid. The final, surprising reveal compensates in part for the pedestrian sleuthing. Trow has done a better job of getting the tone right in earlier series entries.

This fifth "Grand & Batchelor" mystery (after The Island) has Victorian-era "private enquiry agents" Matthew Grand and James Batchelor deeply embedded in the muddy environs of the Thames. After Emilia, the wife of timber merchant Selwyn Byng, goes missing, he receives a note demanding ransom and no police involvement. He calls in the duo when he receives a package containing a finger with Emilia's ring on it. Then more gruesome body parts are seen bobbing around in the Thames. The enquiry agents are surrounded by a host of quirky characters. While there are macabre elements here and lots of 19th-century detail, everything seems filtered through a comic lens, and Grand and Batchelor can seem like a double act, appearing between engagements at the Hippodrome. VERDICT If you can imagine Dickens's Our Mutual Friend as adapted by Gilbert and Sullivan, you have the gist of this medley of mystery and comedy that proves there are still small treasures to be unearthed by mudlarks (river scavengers) in the debris found along the Thames.--Bob Lunn, Kansas City, MO

November 1, 2018
Could the body in the river be that of the missing tea heiress? And why are so many of the interested parties lying?For Constable George Crossland of the River Police, the peace of an early morning in 1873 London is destroyed by the discovery of a body floating down the Thames. Meanwhile, enquiry agents Matthew Grand and James Batchelor (The Island, 2017, etc.) interview a highly overwrought potential client named Wellington-Smith, who soon confesses to actually being Selwyn Byng, a man whose wife, Emilia, has disappeared. Heiress to the Westmoreland tea fortune, Emilia has been in mourning for nearly a year since the accidental death of her father, Josiah; she's been avoiding conjugal relations with her husband and staying in recent months with her aunt Jane. While Grand and Batchelor question the mercurial Jane, who bristles at the suggestion that Emilia may have run off with a lover, Crossland reports the corpse "moving downriver." By the time it's finally recovered, it's in pieces. Could this be Emilia? Or young prostitute Bet, whom the reader follows in the opening chapter? Trow's whodunit introduces multiple characters from their own perspectives: street urchin Jack Sandal, police surgeon Felix Kempster, a suspicious itinerant from the West Country who calls himself William Bisgrove, and oddly named police inspector "Daddy" Bliss. Much of the investigation focuses on the thuggish Mr. Knowes, who's reportedly in the import/export business. He at first foils efforts to locate him, then evades questions from Batchelor and plots a strategy to undermine the detective duo.The fifth Victorian whodunit from the prolific author of the Kit Marlowe and Lestrade mysteries offers Dickensian portraits of period archetypes and a shrewdly layered puzzle.

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