Pierce’s Picks

A periodic alert for followers of crime and thriller fiction.



Steps to the Gallows (Allison & Busby) is Edward Marston’s second boisterous adventure for Peter and Paul Skillen. Those identical twins are more-than-capable “thief-takers,” but when it comes to bodyguarding, they’re less than perfect. As this tale commences, it’s 1816, in London, and Leonidas Paige—an ex-soldier who has turned to the enemy-making enterprise of satirizing lawmakers and other pompous personages in newspapers and cartoons—has become worried for his safety. So he employs the Skillens and their associates to watch his back. Despite such protections, Paige is soon garroted and his lodgings set ablaze. The brothers, upset that they could not safeguard their client, commit themselves to identifying and bringing down his murderer. To do that, though, will require their watching over the stubborn and capable woman who’d peddled the deceased’s work; finding the artist who’d helped Paige lampoon his targets; investigating an assortment of prosperous men upset by their treatment at Paige’s hands; figuring out how to assist a prisoner under threat escape from his cell; and fending off their arrogant rivals in crime-solving, the Bow Street Runners. To bring this case to its conclusion, the siblings will also rush away to Paris, where Paul fears his actress inamorata may be in danger from a lecherous villain. Marston (aka Keith Miles), author of the Nicholas Bracewell mysteries and the Railway Detective series, in addition to last year’s debut for Peter and Paul Skillen, in Shadow of the Hangman, offers a sharp wit, prodigious plotting skills, and a manifest appreciation for historical atmospherics in his novels. Such delightful storytelling!

Skip back one year, to 1815, and you have the time period in which the events in Lloyd Shepherd’s The Detective and the Devil (Simon & Schuster UK) take place. Constable Charles Horton from London’s Thames River Police Office is summoned to the city’s East End to probe the gruesome slaying of a family, headed by a man who clerked for Britain’s East India Company. Horton’s persistent inquiries raise the hackles of that company, which is powerful enough and far-reaching enough in its political influence to shut down any threats to its reputation. They also bring the policeman into contact with the early 19th-century world of pseudo-science and the supernatural. Might the present homicides be connected to the looting of an alchemist’s library, as well as to the peculiar deaths of East India Company employees handling business with the tropical island of Saint Helena? The search for answers will send Horton and his wife, Abigail, off to the South Pacific in pursuit of a potentially demonic killer. Shepherd, who first made his name with the historical thriller The English Monster: or, The Melancholy Transactions of William Ablass (2012)—in which Charles Horton was introduced—delivers in this new novel (his fourth) a captivating blend of superstition and commercial subterfuge, enriched further by references to French former emperor Napoléon Bonaparte and the 1811 Ratcliffe Highway murders.

Click here to see more of this season’s most-wanted books.

Sink Into This Centenary

It was 100 years ago today--on May 7, 1915, in the frightening midst of World War I--that the mammoth British passenger liner Lusitania was torpedoed and sunk by a German U-boat off the coast of Ireland, killing 1,198 and leaving 761 survivors. If you haven’t read Erik Larson’s recent historical account, Dead Wake: The Last Crossing of the Lusitania, you certainly owe it to yourself to do so. It’s a riveting account that puts the vessel’s doom in the context of the fast-developing war and reconsiders how important its sinking was to the United States’ entry into that conflict.

Two other books, both of them mystery novels, also pay homage to that elegantly appointed Cunard Line steamship.

1999’s Murder on the Lusitania, by Conrad Allen (yet another pseudonym used by Keith Miles, aka “Edward Marston”), is a swiftly paced whodunit that takes place on the Lusitania during its maiden Atlantic crossing, in 1907. Homicide and the theft of the great vessel’s blueprints attract the notice of George Porter Dillman, a “debonair” private detective posing as a passenger, but he’s also drawn to a capable young woman who is not quite what she seems. In The Lusitania Murders (originally released in 2002), Max Allan Collins takes readers aboard the Cunard liner for its fatal final voyage from New York City to Liverpool, unwinding a plot in which Willard Wright, a journalist and mystery writer--better known by his pen name, S.S. Van Dine (the creator of foppish sleuth Philo Vance)--goes undercover to investigate the secret shipment of munitions on board the liner, and engages in a dalliance with a female Pinkerton agent to make the crossing even more pleasant.

Oh, there’s actually one more work of fiction worth knowing about, should you wish to commemorate this centennial by diving into a book about the 1915 submarine attack, and that’s Raymond Hitchcock’s The Lusitania Plot (first published in 1979 as Attack the Lusitania!, but brought back into print last year by Ostara). As a short review in Shots explains, “This book’s plot centers around an age-old conspiracy theory; namely that Winston Churchill, who was then First Lord of the Admiralty, wanted the Lusitania sunk to bring America into the war on the side of the Allies. Not entirely certain if the Germans would actually go so far as to attack such a famous liner, Raymond Hitchcock adds the twist that the Admiralty decided to do the job themselves and have the Germans blamed for it.”

Pierce’s Picks: “Shadow of the Alchemist”

A weekly alert for followers of crime, mystery, and thriller fiction.

Shadow of the Alchemist, by Jeri Westerson (Minotaur):
There’s no mystery about why I enjoy Jeri Westerson’s Crispin Guest yarns: they’re historical whodunits--or “Medieval Noirs,” to adopt her term. And though I don’t usually go in for honor-bound knights and elusive holy grails and such, this author’s combination of strongly fashioned characters, sword-clashing action, circuitous plotting, and incidental humor long ago won me over. In Shadow of the Alchemist, her sixth entry in this series (following last year’s Blood Lance), we find a storied French alchemist, Nicholas Flamel, venturing over to London in the year 1387 to engage in escapades of a notably clandestine nature. Flamel’s wife and youthful apprentice soon go missing, though, and the alchemist seeks out disgraced knight--and renowned “tracker”--Crispin Guest to find them. It sounds like a domestic matter; Flamel hints that the pair have absconded together for immoral purposes. And Guest, like his private-eye counterparts of the later 20th century, would prefer to stay away from such sordid matters. Yet, after one of the pair suddenly turns up quite dead, and Flamel is instructed that he’ll have to turn over knowledge of a fabled “Philosopher’s Stone” (said to be capable of transforming base metal into gold) if he’s ever to see the other alive once more, Guest’s involvement in the case deepens. A murderer is at large, one who’s fond of leading our hero on with obscure clues to forthcoming events. Westerson does a superior job of incorporating into this treasure-hunt tale the political and social complexities of Guest’s era, without hobbling her plot’s rollicking momentum.

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Speaking of historical mysteries, you should also check out Edward Marston’s Five Dead Canaries (Allison & Busby UK), the third of his World War I-set “Home Front Detective” novels. Here we find Inspector Harvey Marnion and Sergeant Joe Keedy (introduced in 2011’s A Bespoke Murder) on the hunt for whoever killed a group of munitionettes, or “canary girls,” determinedly independent women who worked in Britain’s munitions factories. The year is 1916, and Scotland Yard’s suspicions fall immediately on German spies. But Marnion and Keedy aren’t sure that easy answer is the right one. Their investigation will illuminate a variety of societal changes and ills, and leave them racing against the restrictions of time in order to save other “canaries” from being brutally plucked off.

Clothes Make the Murder

On the Kirkus Reviews Web site today, I review A Bespoke Murder, the opening installment of Edward Marston’s new “Home Front Detective Series,” set in Britain during World War I. As I write in that post:

A Bespoke Murder follows a long line of mystery and thriller novels in which World War I or its aftermath are integral to the storytelling. Robert Goddard’s In Pale Battalions (1988), Charles Todd’s A Test of Wills (1996), Rennie Airth’s River of Darkness (1999) and Max Allan Collins’ The Lusitania Murders (2002) are merely a few that have come before. This being the opening chapter in a new series, however, Marston--who’s best known for his Elizabethan theater mysteries and more recent succession of books about “Railway Detective” Robert Colbeck (The Excursion Train)--should have opportunities to explore the war’s impact on life and politics beyond the battlefield in a way those other writers did not. He certainly seems to have the motivation to do so.

You will find the full critique here.