Reviews and Comments

Really enjoyed this. Some of the plot was quite farfetched but I think that's normal for this genre. I liked the characters and they didn't make the outcome too obvious. It also had some suprisingly touching reflections on getting older.

To be fair to this book, it is the last in a series and I might have enjoyed it more if I had read the rest of them.

Overall it was a fun Victorian crime mystery, but I found some of the main characters hard to like and therefore root for. It had the problem of a lot of historical novels that follow the upper classes who are the ones with the means to do interesting things but are living in luxury surrounded by impoverished servants. This is exacerbated by the fact that one of the main characters has an explosive temper which adds drama but personally I didn't understand why the other main characters constantly excused his outbursts of violence.

I did enjoy the mystery aspect; it was original and balanced the possibility of the supernatural against the investigations of Victorian science up until the end