Ah, yet another Victorian era murder mystery that involves Dickens and/or Dickensian characters. Not that I’m complaining, I like this kind of stuff. I’m mostly just jealous of the people who beat me to the idea, especially the good ones. And this one is pretty decent.
The story takes place in London, 1850. Our hero is Charles Maddox, a young man who wanted to be a police detective. Unfortunately, his detective skills and his temper got him dismissed from “the Detective,” and possibly gained him an enemy in Detective Bucket. Charles is named after his great-uncle, a famous thief taker; so now Charles begins a life as a private detective. Charles has some baggage, because what detective doesn’t have any – Charles’ baggage involves the disappearance of his sister, for which he blames himself. As the book progresses, we learn exactly how that event tore his family apart.
Charles is given a job by a famous barrister, Edward Tulkinghorne, who plays a role in Dickens’ Bleak House. In fact more than one Bleak House character appears here, because Shepherd used that book and Wilkie Collins’ The Woman in White as inspiration and source material. The job is to find a guy who has been sending threatening letters to a baronet. Charles finds the guy, gets his ass kicked by him, and then that guy is (of course) murdered.
There’s a lot going on here, and the author touches pretty much all of the Dickensian touchstones. Squalor of London? Check. Rat catching & dogs killing the rats? Check. Very young prostitutes? Check. Jack the Ripper? Check. It’s all there. Lots of cliches, but somehow the book was still gripping and a good read. The mystery and most of the perversions were pretty easy to figure out, but sometimes that’s Ok.
The author has another book – Murder at Mansfield Park – about which I’m pretty curious. I won’t be reading it until I can get it cheap or free on the Kindle, or through the library. The writer is good, but she’s not quite good enough to make me spend money. Yet.
Cannonball Read V 
Sounds like an intriguing read, thanks for sharing!