The Fleet Street Murders by Charles FinchMinotaur Books, 2009

It’s Christmas, 1866, and Charles Lenox, amateur detective, is enjoying the holiday with his brother, his brother’s wife and children, and his own betrothed, Lady Jane Grey. But the next day, Lenox reads in the papers of two murders: Winston Carruthers, a journalist/newspaper editor for a conservative paper, has been killed, as has Simon Pierce, who writes for and edits a liberal newspaper. Carruthers, we see, has been working on some kind of exposé, and it seems clear that the crimes are somehow linked. Though Lenox has plenty to do—his brother has recently approached him about running for Parliament—the lure of a case proves irresistible. This is especially true because something seems fishy to Lenox: Scotland Yard quickly makes an arrest and says they’ve solved the case, but Lenox isn’t so sure: it seems to him that the murders must have been arranged by a very rich man, and the man who’s been arrested is a commoner. That commoner dies in prison, and Scotland Yard arrests a rich man eventually, too, but it still doesn’t seem right to Lenox, or to his apprentice, Dallington, or to one of his friends at the Yard itself.

The whole side plot in this book about Lenox campaigning for Parliament in this book was sometimes charming, but sometimes way too twee. There’s kind of a lot of Lenox thinking about how noble it would be to serve his country by being in Parliament, and there’s also a lot of Lenox meeting the good sturdy small-town folks of the (fictional) village of Stirrington, farmers and publicans and grain merchants and so on. I thought the mystery itself was better than the non-mystery parts of the story. While some plot developments surprised me, the identity of the man truly responsible for the Fleet Street Murders is clear to the reader quite early in the book, much earlier than Lenox himself figures it out, which I actually think is a fine approach: the question for the reader isn’t “who did it?”; instead, the reader has a series of questions (like: the question of motive, the question of when/how Lenox will figure it out, and the question of what other bits of the story will get fleshed out as Lenox ties things together).