Review:A Knife in the Fog

 There must be nearly as many pastiches matching Sherlock Holmes against Jack the
Ripper as there are well … Sherlock Holmes pastiches. But how many books match Arthur Conan Doyle against Jack the Ripper? And team Doyle up with his mentor and inspiration for Sherlock Holmes Dr. Joseph Bell? And further add in Margaret Harkness, a real-life author and fierce activist who functions as both damsel in distress and constant rescuer of Doyle and Bell? And entangles Doyle and the Ripper so completely that no one else could ever bring the serial murderer of women to justice? The Knife in the Fog has all these things.

More, author Bradley Harper brings a sterling ear for the voice of the narrator to the proceedings—not the voice of Watson, but the voice of Doyle himself, which is different. If sometimes that voice seems overly dry, and occasionally over pedantic. If you’ve read any of Doyle’s non-fiction works, you’ll recognize it, and appreciate the thoroughness of the research Harper brings to this little tale, as well as a very plausible (and I think, original) candidate for the identity of the Ripper unmasked. And a wholly convincing and nerve-rattling denouement to his tale.

It’s not a perfect tale—the subplot of the men in the checked jackets could have been jettisoned, and some of the lighter moments are marred by repetition, but on the whole this is an original and very satisfying tale. Pick it up and read it before it gets made into a movie, and then you can lord it over your friends by saying “the book was better”.

Review: The Ghost of Madison Avenue

The tradition of ghost stories at Christmas is an old one. Dickens wrote four more
after the success of A Christmas Carol. One could hope that Nancy Bilyeau’s The Ghost of Madison Street is so successful that she’ll feel tempted to write another next year.

Ms. Bilyeau has crafted a charming little tale (and my main complaint about this tale is that it’s too short—which is also in keeping with tradition) of a lonely widowed librarian who goes to work in the private, cathedral-like library of the fabulously wealthy, fabulously powerful J. P. Morgan, who really was a fabulous personage at the turn of the century. But the librarian—Helen O’Neil has a secret which threatens her job and the peace of her family. She’s being haunted by a ghost—or is it a ghost, good Catholic girls don’t believe in ghosts, and she doesn’t know who she can share her secret with.

Nor is she an ordinary librarian. Her Irish-born mother, now dead, early on pronounced her aes sidhe, a fairy child, due to her uncanny skills with her hands, which was the reason she was hired by Morgan to begin with. Yet her secret and her attempts to confide it in her brothers and sisters only lead to resentment and recriminations, until she sees—well, that would be telling, wouldn’t it? I’ll only say that the lighting of the candle on Christmas Eve brings a beloved member of the family home.

Bilyeau brings love and understanding to the Irish of her native New York, and paints a picture which brings us close to that time while keeping it elusively distant: a masterful trick, and exactly the type  of tale you’ll want to re-read, aloud, under the lights of the Christmas tree.

Three dates, three sites, three murders.

Three dates, three sites, three murders:

• 1890, Auvers-Sur-Oise, France
• 1912, London, England
• 1923, Cairo. Egypt 

(Actually, there are plenty more murders)

Three of Sherlock Holmes's most puzzling cases, unearthed for the very first time. 

 

The first, coming in January, 2021, is 

The Strange Case of Eliza Doolittle 

 

from Seventh Street Books.

Two will die. 

But who? Or whom?

Could it be one of these familiar names?

 

But what about the cover?

Oh, before the story comes the cover. This ain't it. I mean, I don't even have a contract for the second book yet, and I'm only on the second draft of the third one.  I designed this for the heck of it.

I mean, this isn't even the original fake cover. 

That one I did when I first wanted to put the book through Caliber, so I could store it on my Kindle. Patricia Pooks Burroughs did a bang-up job on the design of the text. The angel is from Brookfield Cemetery in London (first known as the Necropolis, where a pivotal scene is played out.

And this one was an idea I had when I considered self-publishing--not for itself, but as a model I could hand off to a real artist to clean it up.

No, the real cover looks like this:

Or not.

So far, at least. Watch this space for the real cover. Now where was I?