GRAVE EXPECTATIONS

Charles Dickens probes puzzles large and small as he continues his courtship of his editor’s daughter.

Renting rooms in Selwood Terrace for the summer, in addition to his regular lodgings in Holborn, seemed like a good idea at the time. Although costly, his second home is much closer to his fiancee, Kate Hogarth, and her family. And the temporary move gives Charles and his brother Fred the chance to live in a brighter, airier place than Holborn. Unfortunately, darkness soon makes its way even to relatively rural Chelsea. First, someone slips a copy of a 50-year-old magazine under Charles’ door, with an article titled “Death of a Jewish Child” marked for him to read. But before he can learn the identity of the sender, another more pressing death confronts him. Worried that he hasn’t seen his elderly neighbor, Miss Haverstock, in several days, Charles goes upstairs to her apartment and finds her arrayed in an ancient wedding dress and strangled to death. His investigation gains even more urgency when Daniel Jones, a local blacksmith, is arrested for the crime, leaving his family on the brink of eviction by their unscrupulous landlord. The police suspect Jones of being in league with Osvald Larsen and Ned Blood, two escaped convicts. But Charles is more suspicious of Miss Haverstock’s foster daughter, Evelina Jaggers, and her suitor, Prince Moss. While Charles, aided by the ever charming Kate, struggles to help the Joneses, he also has to keep an eye on young Fred as well as on his hapless father, always a hair’s breadth from debtor’s prison. The life of a promising journalist in 19th-century London is complicated, but Redmond’s (A Tale of Two Murders, 2018) hero is more than up to the challenge in this topsy-turvy take on a British literary classic.

Once again, Redmond mixes history, mystery, and a little bit of whimsy.