DEATH AMONG THE RUINS

A 17th-century bookseller investigates the death of a maidservant.

Lucy Campion knows that she’s been extraordinarily lucky in life. After she was pressed into service as a housemaid at a young age, her kind employer, Master Adam Hargrave, recognized her intelligence, allowing her to learn to read and write alongside his own children, Adam and Sarah. Now apprenticed to Master Aubrey, a printer, Lucy is free to roam the streets of London with fellow apprentice Lach, hawking broadsides with fantastical tales of their own invention. While reading “The Strange Tale of a Two-Headed Pig” in the marketplace, Lucy overhears ragpicker Mercy Sykes peddling “fine clothes from a lady of qu-quality” to the assembled crowd. Then a woman appears, accusing Mercy of stealing the clothes from her dead mother's grave—and proves it by finding her mother's initials embroidered inside the sleeve. The next day Mercy is back, and this time the body she’s robbed is not buried in a churchyard but hidden in the ruined alleyways scorched by the Great Fire. A brisk inquiry among the local tailors and merchants helps Lucy trace the clothing on this second corpse to Charlotte Mobley, daughter of a wealthy family. But the unfortunate girl Mercy stripped them from was Charlotte’s maid, Effie Jones. Spurred on by the contrast between her own good fortune and Effie’s wretched end, Lucy vows to discover how Effie came to be murdered in the ruins, clothed in her mistress’s finery. Her efforts reveal a dark web of interlocking misdeeds and some hard truths about life in Shakespearean London.

Grisly but witty and colorful.