SOME DANGER INVOLVED

A private eye hits the mean streets of Victorian London.

Newcomer Cyrus Barker is hulking and anvil-fisted, yet no slouch at ratiocination either. He’s supported here by a budding Boswell, Thomas Llewelyn, out of Oxford University and just out of Oxford Prison (eight months on a trumped-up larceny rap). Thomas has only recently come aboard, but he seems to have been born to the sleuthing craft, and his is the discerning and deeply admiring lens through which we watch London’s foremost enquiry agent (he abjures the term “detective”) operate. Their debut case involves a particularly gruesome homicide with hate-crime overtones: the crucifixion of Jewish student Louis Pokrzya. Is the brutal murder the work of the venomous Anti-Semite League? wonders the Jewish Board of Deputies as it commissions Barker to investigate. Perhaps so, perhaps not, replies Barker, with his customary caution, while acknowledging that this is “not the safest time to be a Jew in London.” Trailed by his eager assistant, Barker sets about trying to “learn” the murdered student, not by any means an easy task. Though attractive and intelligent enough, Louis was a man who apparently preferred life on the periphery, a man who kept his secrets and made few close friends. But maybe a single serious enemy?

Thomas’s dark and dangerous London, impeccably researched, comes alive much more fully than his bland and underimagined cast.