Category: Fiction

I liked the last two short stories in this book the best, because one is a fairy tale and the other’s a spy story gone strange. Emmanuel’s style, which is sometimes dreamy but sometimes just trite, works for me when it’s playing with a genre like that: the other four stories in this book sometimes…

I found Light on the sidewalk and brought it home on the strength of the back cover blurb, a quote from The New York Times Book Review that says the book is “a luminous prose poem of a novel” and also calls it “unhurried” and “richly descriptive.” I’d never heard of Figes, and have never…

Mildred Lathbury, “an unmarried woman just over thirty, who lives alone and has no apparent ties,” enjoys the ordinary routines of her days, months, years (5). She works part-time at an organisation that helps “impoverished gentlewomen”; she is involved in her local church and is close friends with the vicar, Father Malory, and his sister…

I think what I liked best about this book was its setting: Cambridge, England, in 1171. Spring and the rain and the cherry blossoms, and a city centered around its river, a city of traders and barges and punts and quays and bridges. Comparing it to her hometown of Salerno, the main character thinks about…

Books that are “writerly” or self-consciously “literary” in certain ways really appeal to me, and part of what I enjoyed about Jamrach’s Menagerie is that writerly charm. First, there’s the prose: it’s lush, detailed, descriptive, full of place, of weather, of sound, of slants of light. It’s beautiful (though there are also, you should be…

It’s May 1873, and Charles Lenox, now 42, is pretty settled as a member of Parliament, and not really an active detective any longer. When this book starts, he’s in Plymouth, about to set sail on a ship called the Lucy, on a trip with two purposes. Publicly, he’s traveling as an emissary from the…

Sleight is disorienting at first: entering the world of the book means picking up its vocabulary, the vocabulary of an imagined form of art called sleight that’s part acrobatics, part dance, but something else entirely. One character, early in the book, says sleight is “beyond anything it may have come from. Or out of”: she…

At one point in this book, the fourth of Charles Finch’s mysteries featuring amateur detective Charles Lenox, one character brings another a stack of magazines full of crime stories. “It’s what I always read when I’m sick,” he says; “Somehow having a fever makes them even more exciting.” (271) This is about how I feel…

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,…

The September Society is the sequel to A Beautiful Blue Death, which I wrote about here; like the first book, it’s set in Victorian England and features a wealthy amateur detective, Charles Lenox. Also like the first one, it’s sometimes a little clunky and over-explanatory—I’m thinking particularly of an aside on the Reform Act of…